We prove an exponential upper bound for the number $f(m,n)$ of all maximal triangulations of the $m\times n$ grid: \[ f(m,n) < 2^{3mn}. \] In particular, this improves a result of S. Yu. Orevkov (1999).
We prove a discrete analogue to a classical isoperimetric theorem of Weil for surfaces with non-positive curvature. It is shown that hexagons in the triangular lattice have maximal volume among all sets of a given boundary in any triangulation with minimal degree 6.
Pursuing the approach of Angel & Ray, we introduce and study a family of random infinite triangulations of the full-plane that satisfy a natural spatial Markov property. These new random lattices naturally generalize Angel & Schramm's Uniform Infinite Planar Triangulation (UIPT) and are hyperbolic in flavor. We prove that they exhibit a sharp exponential volume growth, are non-Liouville, and that the simple random walk on them has positive speed almost surely. We conjecture that these infinite triangulations are the local limits of uniform triangulations whose genus is proportional to the size…
Pointed pseudo-triangulations are planar minimally rigid graphs embedded in the plane with pointed vertices (adjacent to an angle larger than 180 degrees. In this paper we prove that the opposite statement is also true, namely that planar minimally rigid graphs always admit pointed embeddings, even under certain natural topological and combinatorial constraints. We provide two proofs, which both yield efficient embedding algorithms. One based on Henneberg inductive constructions from combinatorial rigidity theory, the other on a generalization of Tutte's barycentric embeddings to directed grap…
Whitney proved in 1931 that every 4-connected planar triangulation is hamiltonian. Later in 1979, Hakimi, Schmeichel and Thomassen conjectured that every such triangulation on $n$ vertices has at least $2(n - 2)(n - 4)$ hamiltonian cycles. Along this direction, Brinkmann, Souffriau and Van Cleemput established a linear lower bound on the number of hamiltonian cycles in 4-connected planar triangulations. In stark contrast, Alahmadi, Aldred and Thomassen showed that every 5-connected triangulation of the plane or the projective plane has exponentially many hamiltonian cycles. This gives the moti…
In this paper, we consider the problem of determining in polynomial time whether a given planar point set $P$ of $n$ points admits 4-connected triangulation. We propose a necessary and sufficient condition for recognizing $P$, and present an $O(n^3)$ algorithm of constructing a 4-connected triangulation of $P$. Thus, our algorithm solves a longstanding open problem in computational geometry and geometric graph theory. We also provide a simple method for constructing a noncomplex triangulation of $P$ which requires $O(n^2)$ steps. This method provides a new insight to the structure of 4-connect…
We wish to draw attention to an interesting and promising interaction of two theories. On the one hand, it is the theory of \textbf{pseudo-triangulations} which was useful for implicit solution of thecarpenter's rule problem and proved later to give a nice tool for graph embeddings. On the other hand, it is the theory of hyperbolic virtual polytopes which arose from an old uniqueness conjecture for convex bodies (A. D. Alexandrov's problem): suppose that a constant $C$ separates (non-strictly) everywhere the principal curvature radii of a smooth 3-dimensional convex body $K$. Then $K$ is neces…
We exhibit infinite families of planar graphs with real chromatic roots arbitrarily close to 4, thus resolving a long-standing conjecture in the affirmative.
Hakimi, Schmeichel, and Thomassen in 1979 conjectured that every $4$-connected planar triangulation $G$ on $n$ vertices has at least $2(n-2)(n-4)$ Hamiltonian cycles, with equality if and only if $G$ is a double wheel. In this paper, we show that every $4$-connected planar triangulation on $n$ vertices has $Ω(n^2)$ Hamiltonian cycles. Moreover, we show that if $G$ is a $4$-connected planar triangulation on $n$ vertices and the distance between any two vertices of degree $4$ in $G$ is at least $3$, then $G$ has $2^{Ω(n^{1/4})}$ Hamiltonian cycles.
We present a direct bijection between planar 3-connected triangulations and bridgeless planar maps, which were first enumerated by Tutte (1962) and Walsh and Lehman (1975) respectively. Previously known bijections by Wormald (1980) and Fusy (2010) are all defined recursively. Our direct bijection passes by a new class of combinatorial objects called "sticky trees". We also present bijections between sticky trees, intervals in the Tamari lattices and closed flows on forests. With our bijections, we recover several known enumerative results about these objects. We thus show that sticky trees can…
Whitney proved in 1931 that 4-connected planar triangulations are Hamiltonian. Hakimi, Schmeichel, and Thomassen conjectured in 1979 that if $G$ is a 4-connected planar triangulation with $n$ vertices then $G$ contains at least $2(n-2)(n-4)$ Hamiltonian cycles, with equality if and only if $G$ is a double wheel. On the other hand, a recent result of Alahmadi, Aldred, and Thomassen states that there are exponentially many Hamiltonian cycles in 5-connected planar triangulations. In this paper, we consider 4-connected planar $n$-vertex triangulations $G$ that do not have too many separating 4-cyc…
We show that a point set of cardinality $n$ in the plane cannot be the vertex set of more than $59^n O(n^{-6})$ straight-edge triangulations of its convex hull. This improves the previous upper bound of $276.75^n$.
We show, without using the Four Color Theorem, that for each planar triangulation, the number of its proper vertex colorings by 4 colors is a determinant and thus can be calculated in a polynomial time. In particular, we can efficiently decide if the number is non-zero.
This article presents new bijections on planar maps. At first a bijection is established between bipolar orientations on planar maps and specific "transversal structures" on triangulations of the 4-gon with no separating 3-cycle, which are called irreducible triangulations. This bijection specializes to a bijection between rooted non-separable maps and rooted irreducible triangulations. This yields in turn a bijection between rooted loopless maps and rooted triangulations, based on the observation that loopless maps and triangulations are decomposed in a similar way into components that are re…
Refining a classical proof of Whitney, we show that any $4$-connected planar triangulation can be decomposed into a Hamiltonian path and two trees. Therefore, every $4$-connected planar graph decomposes into three forests, one having maximum degree at most $2$. We use this result to show that any Hamiltonian planar triangulation can be decomposed into two trees and one spanning tree of maximum degree at most $3$. These decompositions improve the result of Gonçalves [Covering planar graphs with forests, one having bounded maximum degree. J. Comb. Theory, Ser. B, 100(6):729--739, 2010] that ever…
A pseudo-triangle is a simple polygon with three convex vertices, and a pseudo-triangulation is a face-to-face tiling of a planar region into pseudo-triangles. Pseudo-triangulations appear as data structures in computational geometry, as planar bar-and-joint frameworks in rigidity theory and as projections of locally convex surfaces. This survey of current literature includes combinatorial properties and counting of special classes, rigidity theoretical results, representations as polytopes, straight-line drawings from abstract versions called combinatorial pseudo-triangulations, algorithms an…
A $3$-connected graph $G$ is essentially $4$-connected if, for any $3$-cut $S\subseteq V(G)$ of $G$, at most one component of $G-S$ contains at least two vertices. We prove that every essentially $4$-connected maximal planar graph $G$ on $n$ vertices contains a cycle of length at least $\frac{2}{3}(n+4)$; moreover, this bound is sharp.
It is known that for every $α\geq 1$ there is a planar triangulation in which every ball of radius $r$ has size $Θ(r^α)$. We prove that for $α<2$ every such triangulation is quasi-isometric to a tree. The result extends to Riemannian 2-manifolds of finite genus, and to large-scale-simply-connected graphs. We also prove that every planar triangulation of asymptotic dimension 1 is quasi-isometric to a tree.
We consider the so-called coupon-coloring of the vertices of a graph where every color appears in every open neighborhood, and our aim is to determine the maximal number of colors in such colorings. In other words, every color class must be a total dominating set in the graph and we study the total domatic number of the graph. We determine this parameter in every maximal outerplanar graph, and show that every Hamiltonian maximal planar graph has domatic number at least two, partially answering a conjecture of Goddard and Henning.
We establish a connection between the uniform infinite planar triangulation and some critical time-reversed branching process. This allows to find a scaling limit for the principal boundary component of a ball of radius R for large R (i.e. for a boundary component separating the ball from infinity). We show also that outside of R-ball a contour exists that has length linear in R.
An $r$-dynamic $k$-coloring of a graph $G$ is a proper $k$-coloring such that for any vertex $v$, there are at least $\min\{r, deg_G(v) \}$ distinct colors in $N_G(v)$. The $r$-dynamic chromatic number $χ_r^d(G)$ of a graph $G$ is the least $k$ such that there exists an $r$-dynamic $k$-coloring of $G$. The list $r$-dynamic chromatic number of a graph $G$ is denoted by $ch_r^d(G)$. Loeb et al. $[11]$ showed that $ch_3^d(G)\leq 10$ for every planar graph $G$, and there is a planar graph $G$ with $χ_3^d(G)= 7$. In this paper, we study a special class of planar graphs which have better upper bound…
We show that every simple planar near-triangulation with minimum degree at least three contains two disjoint total dominating sets. The class includes all simple planar triangulations other than the triangle. This affirms a conjecture of Goddard and Henning [Thoroughly dispersed colorings, J. Graph Theory, 88 (2018) 174-191].
We consider the problem of morphing between two planar drawings of the same triangulated graph, maintaining straight-line planarity. A paper in SODA 2013 gave a morph that consists of $O(n^2)$ steps where each step is a linear morph that moves each of the $n$ vertices in a straight line at uniform speed. However, their method imitates edge contractions so the grid size of the intermediate drawings is not bounded and the morphs are not good for visualization purposes. Using Schnyder embeddings, we are able to morph in $O(n^2)$ linear morphing steps and improve the grid size to $O(n)\times O(n)$…
We develop a method to compute the generating function of the number of vertices inside certain regions of the Uniform Infinite Planar Triangulation (UIPT). The computations are mostly combinatorial in flavor and the main tool is the decomposition of the UIPT into layers, called the skeleton decomposition, introduced by Krikun. In particular, we get explicit formulas for the generating functions of the number of vertices inside hulls (or completed metric balls) centered around the root, and the number of vertices inside geodesic slices of these hulls. We also recover known results about the sc…
A 2-tree is a graph that can be formed by starting with a triangle and iterating the operation of making a new vertex adjacent to two adjacent vertices of the existing graph. Leizhen Cai asked in 1995 whether every maximal planar graph contains a spanning 2-tree. We answer this question in the negative by constructing an infinite class of maximal planar graphs that have no spanning 2-tree.
We prove that properly rescaled large planar Eulerian triangulations converge to the Brownian map. This result requires more than a standard application of the methods that have been used to obtain the convergence of other families of planar maps to the Brownian map, as the natural distance for Eulerian triangulations is a canonical oriented pseudo-distance. To circumvent this difficulty, we adapt the layer decomposition method established by Curien and Le Gall, which yields asymptotic proportionality between three natural distances on planar Eulerian triangulations: the usual graph distance, …
For any finite set $\A$ of $n$ points in $\R^2$, we define a $(3n-3)$-dimensional simple polyhedron whose face poset is isomorphic to the poset of ``non-crossing marked graphs'' with vertex set $\A$, where a marked graph is defined as a geometric graph together with a subset of its vertices. The poset of non-crossing graphs on $\A$ appears as the complement of the star of a face in that polyhedron. The polyhedron has a unique maximal bounded face, of dimension $2n_i +n -3$ where $n_i$ is the number of points of $\A$ in the interior of $\conv(\A)$. The vertices of this polytope are all the pseu…
In this paper, the scaling limit of random connected cubic planar graphs (respectively multigraphs) is shown to be the Brownian sphere. The proof consists in essentially two main steps. First, thanks to the known decomposition of cubic planar graphs into their 3-connected components, the metric structure of a random cubic planar graph is shown to be well approximated by its unique 3-connected component of linear size, with modified distances. Then, Whitney's theorem ensures that a 3-connected cubic planar graph is the dual of a simple triangulation, for which it is known that the scaling limit…
We prove that every triangulation of either of the torus, projective plane and Klein bottle, contains a vertex-spanning planar Laman graph as a subcomplex. Invoking a result of Kir{á}ly, we conclude that every $1$-skeleton of a triangulation of a surface of nonnegative Euler characteristic has a rigid realization in the plane using at most 26 locations for the vertices.
Tutte proved that if $G_{pt}$ is a planar triangulation and $P(G_{pt},q)$ is its chromatic polynomial, then $|P(G_{pt},τ+1)| \le (τ-1)^{n-5}$, where $τ=(1+\sqrt{5} \,)/2$ and $n$ is the number of vertices in $G_{pt}$. Here we study the ratio $r(G_{pt})=|P(G_{pt},τ+1)|/(τ-1)^{n-5}$ for a variety of planar triangulations. We construct infinite recursive families of planar triangulations $G_{pt,m}$ depending on a parameter $m$ linearly related to $n$ and show that if $P(G_{pt,m},q)$ only involves a single power of a polynomial, then $r(G_{pt,m})$ approaches zero exponentially fast as $n \to \inft…
We study straight-line drawings of planar graphs with prescribed face areas. A plane graph is 'area-universal' if for every area assignment on the inner faces, there exists a straight-line drawing realizing the prescribed areas. For triangulations with a special vertex order, we present a sufficient criterion for area-universality that only requires the investigation of one area assignment. Moreover, if the sufficient criterion applies to one plane triangulation, then all embeddings of the underlying planar graph are also area-universal. Until now, it is open whether area-universality is a pro…
We provide bounds for the product of the lengths of distinguished shortest paths in a finite network induced by a triangulation of a topological planar quadrilateral.
For every graph $H$, there exists a polynomial-time algorithm deciding if a planar input graph $G$ can be contracted to~$H$. However, the degree of the polynomial depends on the size of $H$. In this paper, we identify a class of graphs $\cal C$ such that for every $H \in \cal C$, there exists an algorithm deciding in time $f(|V(H)|) \cdot |V(G)|^{\bigO{1}}$ whether a planar graph $G$ can be contracted to~$H$. (The function $f(\cdot)$ does not depend on $G$.) The class $\cal C$ is the closure of planar triangulated graphs under taking of contractions. In fact, we prove that a graph $H \in \cal …
Poulalhon and Schaeffer introduced an elegant method to linearly encode a planar triangulation optimally. The method is based on performing a special depth-first search algorithm on a particular orientation of the triangulation: the minimal Schnyder wood. Recent progress toward generalizing Schnyder woods to higher genus enables us to generalize this method to the toroidal case. In the plane, the method leads to a bijection between planar triangulations and some particular trees. For the torus we obtain a similar bijection but with particular unicellular maps (maps with only one face).
We prove that among all flag triangulations of manifolds of odd dimension 2r-1 with sufficiently many vertices the unique maximizer of the entries of the f-, h-, g- and gamma-vector is the balanced join of r cycles. Our proof uses methods from extremal graph theory.
We pose a monotonicity conjecture on the number of pseudo-triangulations of any planar point set, and check it on two prominent families of point sets, namely the so-called double circle and double chain. The latter has asymptotically $12^n n^{Θ(1)}$ pointed pseudo-triangulations, which lies significantly above the maximum number of triangulations in a planar point set known so far.
In this work we consider balanced Schnyder woods for planar graphs, which are Schnyder woods where the number of incoming edges of each color at each vertex is balanced as much as possible. We provide a simple linear-time heuristic leading to obtain well balanced Schnyder woods in practice. As test applications we consider two important algorithmic problems: the computation of Schnyder drawings and of small cycle separators. While not being able to provide theoretical guarantees, our experimental results (on a wide collection of planar graphs) suggest that the use of balanced Schnyder woods le…
We present bijections for planar maps with boundaries. In particular, we obtain bijections for triangulations and quadrangulations of the sphere with boundaries of prescribed lengths. For triangulations we recover the beautiful factorized formula obtained by Krikun using a (technically involved) generating function approach. The analogous formula for quadrangulations is new. We also obtain a far-reaching generalization for other face-degrees. In fact, all the known enumerative formulas for maps with boundaries are proved bijectively in the present article (and several new formulas are obtained…
The hull perimeter at distance d in a planar map with two marked vertices at distance k from each other is the length of the closed curve separating these two vertices and lying at distance d from the first one (d<k). We study the statistics of hull perimeters in large random planar triangulations and quadrangulations as a function of both k and d. Explicit expressions for the probability density of the hull perimeter at distance d, as well as for the joint probability density of hull perimeters at distances d1 and d2, are obtained in the limit of infinitely large k. We also consider the situa…
We discuss the problem to count, or, more modestly, to estimate the number f(m,n) of unimodular triangulations of the planar grid of size $m\times n$. Among other tools, we employ recursions that allow one to compute the (huge) number of triangulations for small m and rather large n by dynamic programming; we show that this computation can be done in polynomial time if m is fixed, and present computational results from our implementation of this approach. We also present new upper and lower bounds for large m and n, and we report about results obtained from a computer simulation of the random …
We provide "growth schemes" for inductively generating uniform random $2p$-angulations of the sphere with $n$ faces, as well as uniform random simple triangulations of the sphere with $2n$ faces. In the case of $2p$-angulations, we provide a way to insert a new face at a random location in a uniform $2p$-angulation with $n$ faces in such a way that the new map is precisely a uniform $2p$-angulation with $n+1$ faces. Similarly, given a uniform simple triangulation of the sphere with $2n$ faces, we describe a way to insert two new adjacent triangles so as to obtain a uniform simple triangulation…
Ordinary tensor models of rank $D\geq 3$ are dominated at large $N$ by tree-like graphs, known as melonic triangulations. We here show that non-melonic contributions can be enhanced consistently, leading to different types of large $N$ limits. We first study the most generic quartic model at $D=4$, with maximally enhanced non-melonic interactions. The existence of the $1/N$ expansion is proved and we further characterize the dominant triangulations. This combinatorial analysis is then used to define a non-quartic, non-melonic class of models for which the large $N$ free energy and the relevant…
We present a new derivation of the distance-dependent two-point function of random planar triangulations. As it is well-known, this function is intimately related to the generating functions of so-called slices, which are pieces of triangulation having boundaries made of shortest paths of prescribed length. We show that the slice generating functions are fully determined by a direct recursive relation on their boundary length. Remarkably, the kernel of this recursion is some quantity introduced and computed by Tutte a long time ago in the context of a global enumeration of planar triangulation…
We show that any two geometric triangulations of a closed hyperbolic, spherical or Euclidean manifold are related by a sequence of Pachner moves and barycentric subdivisions of bounded length. This bound is in terms of the dimension of the manifold, the number of top dimensional simplexes and bound on the lengths of edges of the triangulation. This leads to an algorithm to check from the combinatorics of the triangulation and bounds on lengths of edges, if two geometrically triangulated closed hyperbolic or low dimensional spherical manifolds are isometric or not.
Stack-triangulations appear as natural objects when one wants to define some increasing families of triangulations by successive additions of faces. We investigate the asymptotic behavior of rooted stack-triangulations with $2n$ faces under two different distributions. We show that the uniform distribution on this set of maps converges, for a topology of local convergence, to a distribution on the set of infinite maps. In the other hand, we show that rescaled by $n^{1/2}$, they converge for the Gromov-Hausdorff topology on metric spaces to the continuum random tree introduced by Aldous. Under …