It is known that every planar graph has a planar embedding where edges are represented by non-crossing straight-line segments. We study the planar slope number, i.e., the minimum number of distinct edge-slopes in such a drawing of a planar graph with maximum degree $Δ$. We show that the planar slope number of every planar partial 3-tree and also every plane partial 3-tree is at most $O(Δ^5)$. In particular, we answer the question of Dujmović et al. [Computational Geometry 38 (3), pp. 194--212 (2007)] whether there is a function $f$ such that plane maximal outerplanar graphs can be drawn using at most $f(Δ)$ slopes.
We study straight-line drawings of planar graphs with few segments and few slopes. Optimal results are obtained for all trees. Tight bounds are obtained for outerplanar graphs, 2-trees, and planar 3-trees. We prove that every 3-connected plane graph on $n$ vertices has a plane drawing with at most ${5/2}n$ segments and at most $2n$ slopes. We prove that every cubic 3-connected plane graph has a plane drawing with three slopes (and three bends on the outerface). In a companion paper, drawings of non-planar graphs with few slopes are also considered.
We settle a problem of Dujmović, Eppstein, Suderman, and Wood by showing that there exists a function $f$ with the property that every planar graph $G$ with maximum degree $d$ admits a drawing with noncrossing straight-line edges, using at most $f(d)$ different slopes. If we allow the edges to be represented by polygonal paths with {\em one} bend, then 2d slopes suffice. Allowing {\em two} bends per edge, every planar graph with maximum degree $d\ge 3$ can be drawn using segments of at most $\lceil d/2\rceil$ different slopes. There is only one exception: the graph formed by the edges of an oc…
We consider drawings of graphs in the plane in which edges are represented by polygonal paths with at most one bend and the number of different slopes used by all segments of these paths is small. We prove that $\lceil\fracΔ{2}\rceil$ edge slopes suffice for outerplanar drawings of outerplanar graphs with maximum degree $Δ\geq 3$. This matches the obvious lower bound. We also show that $\lceil\fracΔ{2}\rceil+1$ edge slopes suffice for drawings of general graphs, improving on the previous bound of $Δ+1$. Furthermore, we improve previous upper bounds on the number of slopes needed for planar dra…
Tree decompositions of graphs are of fundamental importance in structural and algorithmic graph theory. Planar decompositions generalise tree decompositions by allowing an arbitrary planar graph to index the decomposition. We prove that every graph that excludes a fixed graph as a minor has a planar decomposition with bounded width and a linear number of bags. The crossing number of a graph is the minimum number of crossings in a drawing of the graph in the plane. We prove that planar decompositions are intimately related to the crossing number. In particular, a graph with bounded degree has l…
We study two decomposition problems in combinatorial geometry. The first part deals with the decomposition of multiple coverings of the plane. We say that a planar set is cover-decomposable if there is a constant m such that any m-fold covering of the plane with its translates is decomposable into two disjoint coverings of the whole plane. Pach conjectured that every convex set is cover-decomposable. We verify his conjecture for polygons. Moreover, if m is large enough, we prove that any m-fold covering can even be decomposed into k coverings. Then we show that the situation is exactly the opp…
The "slope-number" of a graph $G$ is the minimum number of distinct edge slopes in a straight-line drawing of $G$ in the plane. We prove that for $Δ\geq5$ and all large $n$, there is a $Δ$-regular $n$-vertex graph with slope-number at least $n^{1-\frac{8+ε}{Δ+4}}$. This is the best known lower bound on the slope-number of a graph with bounded degree. We prove upper and lower bounds on the slope-number of complete bipartite graphs. We prove a general upper bound on the slope-number of an arbitrary graph in terms of its bandwidth. It follows that the slope-number of interval graphs, cocomparabil…
The planar graph product structure theorem of Dujmović, Joret, Micek, Morin, Ueckerdt, and Wood [J. ACM 2020] states that every planar graph is a subgraph of the strong product of a graph with bounded treewidth and a path. This result has been the key tool to resolve important open problems regarding queue layouts, nonrepetitive colourings, centered colourings, and adjacency labelling schemes. In this paper, we extend this line of research by utilizing shallow minors to prove analogous product structure theorems for several beyond planar graph classes. The key observation that drives our work …
Dujmović, Joret, Micek, Morin, Ueckerdt and Wood recently in [Planar graphs have bounded queue-number, Journal of the ACM, Volume 67, Issue 4, Article No.: 22, August 2020] showed some attractive graph product structure theorems for planar graphs. By using the product structure, they proved that planar graphs have bounded queue-number $48$; in [Planar graphs have bounded nonrepetitive chromatic number, Advances in Combinatorics, 5, 11 pp, 2020], the authors proved that planar graphs have bounded nonrepetitive chromatic number $768$. In this paper, still by using some product structure theorem,…
We prove that any planar graph on $n$ vertices has less than $O(5{.}2852^n)$ spanning trees. Under the restriction that the planar graph is 3-connected and contains no triangle and no quadrilateral the number of its spanning trees is less than $O(2{.}7156^n)$. As a consequence of the latter the grid size needed to realize a 3d polytope with integer coordinates can be bounded by $O(147.{7}^n)$. Our observations imply improved upper bounds for related quantities: the number of cycle-free graphs in a planar graph is bounded by $O(6.4884^n)$, the number of plane spanning trees on a set of $n$ poin…
We consider a surrounding variant of cops and robbers on graphs of bounded genus. We obtain bounds on the number of cops required to surround a robber on planar graphs, toroidal graphs, and outerplanar graphs. We also obtain improved bounds for bipartite planar and toroidal graphs. We briefly consider general graphs of bounded genus and graphs with a forbidden minor.
It is well known that the spectral radius of a tree whose maximum degree is $D$ cannot exceed $2\sqrt{D-1}$. In this paper we derive similar bounds for arbitrary planar graphs and for graphs of bounded genus. It is proved that a the spectral radius $ρ(G)$ of a planar graph $G$ of maximum vertex degree $D\ge 4$ satisfies $\sqrt{D}\le ρ(G)\le \sqrt{8D-16}+7.75$. This result is best possible up to the additive constant--we construct an (infinite) planar graph of maximum degree $D$, whose spectral radius is $\sqrt{8D-16}$. This generalizes and improves several previous results and solves an open p…
A colouring of a graph is "nonrepetitive" if for every path of even order, the sequence of colours on the first half of the path is different from the sequence of colours on the second half. We show that planar graphs have nonrepetitive colourings with a bounded number of colours, thus proving a conjecture of Alon, Grytczuk, Haluszczak and Riordan (2002). We also generalise this result for graphs of bounded Euler genus, graphs excluding a fixed minor, and graphs excluding a fixed topological minor.
We study the effects of planarization (the construction of a planar diagram $D$ from a non-planar graph $G$ by replacing each crossing by a new vertex) on graph width parameters. We show that for treewidth, pathwidth, branchwidth, clique-width, and tree-depth there exists a family of $n$-vertex graphs with bounded parameter value, all of whose planarizations have parameter value $Ω(n)$. However, for bandwidth, cutwidth, and carving width, every graph with bounded parameter value has a planarization of linear size whose parameter value remains bounded. The same is true for the treewidth, pathwi…
In 1976, Steinberg conjectured that planar graphs without $4$-cycles and $5$-cycles are $3$-colorable. This conjecture attracted numerous researchers for about 40 years, until it was recently disproved by Cohen-Addad et al. (2017). However, coloring planar graphs with restrictions on cycle lengths is still an active area of research, and the interest in this particular graph class remains. Let $G$ be a planar graph without $4$-cycles and $5$-cycles. For integers $d_1$ and $d_2$ satisfying $d_1+d_2\geq8$ and $d_2\geq d_1\geq 2$, it is known that $V(G)$ can be partitioned into two sets $V_1$ and…
We show that every 1-planar graph with minimum degree at least 4 has girth at most $8$, and every 1-planar graph with minimum degree at least 3 has girth at most $198$.
We show that planar graphs have bounded queue-number, thus proving a conjecture of Heath, Leighton and Rosenberg from 1992. The key to the proof is a new structural tool called layered partitions, and the result that every planar graph has a vertex-partition and a layering, such that each part has a bounded number of vertices in each layer, and the quotient graph has bounded treewidth. This result generalises for graphs of bounded Euler genus. Moreover, we prove that every graph in a minor-closed class has such a layered partition if and only if the class excludes some apex graph. Building on …
Motivated by applications in graph drawing and information visualization, we examine the planar split thickness of a graph, that is, the smallest $k$ such that the graph is $k$-splittable into a planar graph. A $k$-split operation substitutes a vertex $v$ by at most $k$ new vertices such that each neighbor of $v$ is connected to at least one of the new vertices. We first examine the planar split thickness of complete graphs, complete bipartite graphs, multipartite graphs, bounded degree graphs, and genus-1 graphs. We then prove that it is NP-hard to recognize graphs that are $2$-splittable int…
Let $L_{a,b}$ be a line in the Euclidean plane with slope $a$ and intercept $b$. The dimension spectrum $\spec(L_{a,b})$ is the set of all effective dimensions of individual points on $L_{a,b}$. The dimension spectrum conjecture states that, for every line $L_{a,b}$, the spectrum of $L_{a,b}$ contains a unit interval. In this paper we prove that the dimension spectrum conjecture is true. Let $(a,b)$ be a slope-intercept pair, and let $d = \min\{\dim(a,b), 1\}$. For every $s \in (0, 1)$, we construct a point $x$ such that $\dim(x, ax + b) = d + s$. Thus, we show that $\spec(L_{a,b})$ contains t…
An $({\cal F},{\cal F}_d)$-partition of a graph is a vertex-partition into two sets $F$ and $F_d$ such that the graph induced by $F$ is a forest and the one induced by $F_d$ is a forest with maximum degree at most $d$. We prove that every triangle-free planar graph admits an $({\cal F},{\cal F}_5)$-partition. Moreover we show that if for some integer $d$ there exists a triangle-free planar graph that does not admit an $({\cal F},{\cal F}_d)$-partition, then it is an NP-complete problem to decide whether a triangle-free planar graph admits such a partition.
Motivated by the question of whether planar graphs have bounded queue-number, we prove that planar graphs with maximum degree $Δ$ have queue-number $O(Δ^{2})$, which improves upon the best previous bound of $O(Δ^6)$. More generally, we prove that graphs with bounded degree and bounded Euler genus have bounded queue-number. In particular graphs with Euler genus $g$ and maximum degree $Δ$ have queue-number $O(g+Δ^{2})$. As a byproduct we prove that if planar graphs have bounded queue-number, then graphs of Euler genus $g$ have queue-number $O(g)$.
The anagram-free chromatic number is a new graph parameter introduced independently Kamčev, Łuczak, and Sudakov (2017) and Wilson and Wood (2017). In this note, we show that there are planar graphs of pathwidth 3 with arbitrarily large anagram-free chromatic number. More specifically, we describe $2n$-vertex planar graphs of pathwidth 3 with anagram-free chromatic number $Ω(\log n)$. We also describe $kn$ vertex graphs with pathwidth $2k-1$ having anagram-free chromatic number in $Ω(k\log n)$.
Cubic planar $n$-vertex graphs with faces of length at most $6$, e.g., fullerene graphs, have diameter in $Ω(\sqrt{n})$. It has been suspected, that a similar result can be shown for cubic planar graphs with faces of bounded length. This note provides a family of cubic planar $n$-vertex graphs with faces of length at most $7$ and diameter in ${O}(\log n)$, thus refuting the above suspicion.
In 1981, Kelly showed that planar posets can have arbitrarily large dimension. However, the posets in Kelly's example have bounded Boolean dimension and bounded local dimension, leading naturally to the questions as to whether either Boolean dimension or local dimension is bounded for the class of planar posets. The question for Boolean dimension was first posed by Nešetřil and Pudlák in 1989 and remains unanswered today. The concept of local dimension is quite new, introduced in 2016 by Ueckerdt. Since that time, researchers have obtained many interesting results concerning Boolean dimension …
We study Koebe orderings of planar graphs: vertex orderings obtained by modelling the graph as the intersection graph of pairwise internally-disjoint discs in the plane, and ordering the vertices by non-increasing radii of the associated discs. We prove that for every $d\in \mathbb{N}$, any such ordering has $d$-admissibility bounded by $O(d/\ln d)$ and weak $d$-coloring number bounded by $O(d^4 \ln d)$. This in particular shows that the $d$-admissibility of planar graphs is bounded by $O(d/\ln d)$, which asymptotically matches a known lower bound due to Dvořák and Siebertz.
Heath and Pemmaraju conjectured that the queue-number of a poset is bounded by its width and if the poset is planar then also by its height. We show that there are planar posets whose queue-number is larger than their height, refuting the second conjecture. On the other hand, we show that any poset of width $2$ has queue-number at most $2$, thus confirming the first conjecture in the first non-trivial case. Moreover, we improve the previously best known bounds and show that planar posets of width $w$ have queue-number at most $3w-2$ while any planar poset with $0$ and $1$ has queue-number at m…
In this paper, we consider the problem of representing graphs by polygons whose sides touch. We show that at least six sides per polygon are necessary by constructing a class of planar graphs that cannot be represented by pentagons. We also show that the lower bound of six sides is matched by an upper bound of six sides with a linear-time algorithm for representing any planar graph by touching hexagons. Moreover, our algorithm produces convex polygons with edges having at most three slopes and with all vertices lying on an O(n)xO(n) grid.
We consider straight-line outerplanar drawings of outerplanar graphs in which a small number of distinct edge slopes are used, that is, the segments representing edges are parallel to a small number of directions. We prove that $Δ-1$ edge slopes suffice for every outerplanar graph with maximum degree $Δ\ge 4$. This improves on the previous bound of $O(Δ^5)$, which was shown for planar partial 3-trees, a superclass of outerplanar graphs. The bound is tight: for every $Δ\ge 4$ there is an outerplanar graph with maximum degree $Δ$ that requires at least $Δ-1$ distinct edge slopes in an outerplana…
We investigate two types of graph layouts, track layouts and layered path decompositions, and the relations between their associated parameters track-number and layered pathwidth. We use these two types of layouts to characterize leveled planar graphs, which are the graphs with planar leveled drawings with no dummy vertices. It follows from the known NP-completeness of leveled planarity that track-number and layered pathwidth are also NP-complete, even for the smallest constant parameter values that make these parameters nontrivial. We prove that the graphs with bounded layered pathwidth inclu…
Twin-width is a newly introduced graph width parameter that aims at generalizing a wide range of "nicely structured" graph classes. In this work, we focus on obtaining good bounds on twin-width $\text{tww}(G)$ for graphs $G$ from a number of classic graph classes. We prove the following: - $\text{tww}(G) \leq 3\cdot 2^{\text{tw}(G)-1}$, where $\text{tw}(G)$ is the treewidth of $G$, - $\text{tww}(G) \leq \max(4\text{bw}(G),\frac{9}{2}\text{bw}(G)-3)$ for a planar graph $G$ with $\text{bw}(G) \geq 2$, where $\text{bw}(G)$ is the branchwidth of $G$, - $\text{tww}(G) \leq 183$ for a planar graph $…
We devise constant-factor approximation algorithms for finding as many disjoint cycles as possible from a certain family of cycles in a given planar or bounded-genus graph. Here disjoint can mean vertex-disjoint or edge-disjoint, and the graph can be undirected or directed. The family of cycles under consideration must satisfy two properties: it must be uncrossable and allow for an oracle access that finds a weight-minimal cycle in that family for given nonnegative edge weights or (in planar graphs) the union of all remaining cycles in that family after deleting a given subset of edges. Our se…
Suppose $G$ is a graph with degrees bounded by $d$, and one needs to remove more than $εn$ of its edges in order to make it planar. We show that in this case the statistics of local neighborhoods around vertices of $G$ is far from the statistics of local neighborhoods around vertices of any planar graph $G'$ with the same degree bound. In fact, a similar result is proved for any minor-closed property of bounded degree graphs. As an immediate corollary of the above result we infer that many well studied graph properties, like being planar, outer-planar, series-parallel, bounded genus, bounded t…
Consider the following problem: Given a planar graph $G$, what is the maximum number $p$ such that $G$ has a planar straight-line drawing with $p$ collinear vertices? This problem resides at the core of several graph drawing problems, including universal point subsets, untangling, and column planarity. The following results are known for it: Every $n$-vertex planar graph has a planar straight-line drawing with $Ω(\sqrt{n})$ collinear vertices; for every $n$, there is an $n$-vertex planar graph whose every planar straight-line drawing has $O(n^σ)$ collinear vertices, where $σ<0.986$; every $n$-…
We introduce a strengthening of the notion of transience for planar maps in order to relax the standard condition of bounded degree appearing in various results, in particular, the existence of Dirichlet harmonic functions proved by Benjamini and Schramm. As a corollary we obtain that every planar non-amenable graph admits Dirichlet harmonic functions.
A colouring of a graph $G=(V,E)$ is a function $c: V\rightarrow\{1,2,\ldots \}$ such that $c(u)\neq c(v)$ for every $uv\in E$. A $k$-regular list assignment of $G$ is a function $L$ with domain $V$ such that for every $u\in V$, $L(u)$ is a subset of $\{1, 2, \dots\}$ of size $k$. A colouring $c$ of $G$ respects a $k$-regular list assignment $L$ of $G$ if $c(u)\in L(u)$ for every $u\in V$. A graph $G$ is $k$-choosable if for every $k$-regular list assignment $L$ of $G$, there exists a colouring of $G$ that respects $L$. We may also ask if for a given $k$-regular list assignment $L$ of a given g…
Consider a planar graph $G=(V,E)$ with polynomially bounded edge weight function $w:E\to [0, poly(n)]$. The main results of this paper are NC algorithms for the following problems: - minimum weight perfect matching in $G$, - maximum cardinality and maximum weight matching in $G$ when $G$ is bipartite, - maximum multiple-source multiple-sink flow in $G$ where $c:E\to [1, poly(n)]$ is a polynomially bounded edge capacity function, - minimum weight $f$-factor in $G$ where $f:V\to [1, poly(n)]$, - min-cost flow in $G$ where $c:E\to [1, poly(n)]$ is a polynomially bounded edge capacity function and…
We show that there exists an adjacency labelling scheme for planar graphs where each vertex of an $n$-vertex planar graph $G$ is assigned a $(1+o(1))\log_2 n$-bit label and the labels of two vertices $u$ and $v$ are sufficient to determine if $uv$ is an edge of $G$. This is optimal up to the lower order term and is the first such asymptotically optimal result. An alternative, but equivalent, interpretation of this result is that, for every $n$, there exists a graph $U_n$ with $n^{1+o(1)}$ vertices such that every $n$-vertex planar graph is an induced subgraph of $U_n$. These results generalize…
