Gluck (1975) has proven that triangulated 2-spheres are generically 3-rigid. Equivalently, planar graphs are generically 3-stress free. We show that linklessly embeddable graphs are generically 4-stress free. Both of these results are corollaries of the following theorem: every K_{r+2}-minor free graph is generically r-stress free for 0<r<5. (This assertion is false for r>5.) We give an equivalent formulation of this theorem in the language of symmetric algebraic shifting and show that its analogue for exterior algebraic shifting also holds. Some further extensions are detailed.
The present paper is the first one in the sequence of papers about a simple class of {\em framed $4$-graphs}; the goal of the present paper is to collect some well-known results on planarity and to reformulate them in the language of {\em minors}. The goal of the whole sequence is to prove analogues of the Robertson-Seymour-Thomas theorems for framed $4$-graphs: namely, we shall prove that many minor-closed properties are classified by finitely many excluded graphs. From many points of view, framed $4$-graphs are easier to consider than general graphs; on the other hand, framed $4$-graphs are …
The study of graph drawings on 2-surfaces is an active area of mathematical research. Our main results are criteria for integer and modulo 2 embeddability of graphs to surfaces.
The unit distance embeddability of a graph, like planarity, involves a mix of constraints that are combinatorial and geometric. We construct a unit distance embedding for $H-e$ in the hope that it will lead to an embedding for $H$. We then investigate analytical methods for a general decision procedure for testing unit distance embeddability.
We study embeddings of a graph $G$ in a surface $S$ by considering representatives of different classes of $H_1(S)$ and their intersections. We construct a matrix invariant that can be used to detect homological invariance of elements of the cycle space of a cellularly embedded graph. We show that: for each positive integer $n$, there is a graph embeddable in the torus such that there is a free $\mathbb{Z}_{2p}$-action on the graph that extends to a cellular automorphism of the torus; for an odd prime $p$ greater than 5 the Generalized Petersen Graphs of the form $GP(2p,2)$ do cellularly embed…
The weak minor G of a graph G is the graph obtained from G by a sequence of edge-contraction operations on G. A weak-minor-closed family of upper embeddable graphs is a set G of upper embeddable graphs that for each graph G in G, every weak minor of G is also in G. Up to now, there are few results providing the necessary and sufficient conditions for characterizing upper embeddability of graphs. In this paper, we studied the relation between the vertex splitting operation and the upper embeddability of graphs; provided not only a necessary and sufficient condition for characterizing upper embe…
We study the atomic embeddability testing problem, which is a common generalization of clustered planarity (c-planarity, for short) and thickenability testing, and present a polynomial-time algorithm for this problem, thereby giving the first polynomial-time algorithm for c-planarity. C-planarity was introduced in 1995 by Feng, Cohen, and Eades as a variant of graph planarity, in which the vertex set of the input graph is endowed with a hierarchical clustering and we seek an embedding (crossing free drawing) of the graph in the plane that respects the clustering in a certain natural sense. Unt…
A pseudocircle is a simple closed curve on some surface; an arrangement of pseudocircles is a collection of pseudocircles that pairwise intersect in exactly two points, at which they cross. Ortner proved that an arrangement of pseudocircles is embeddable into the sphere if and only if all of its subarrangements of size at most four are embeddable into the sphere, and asked if an analogous result holds for embeddability into orientable surfaces of higher genus. We answer this question positively: An arrangement of pseudocircles is embeddable into an orientable surface of genus~$g$ if and only i…
Graphs that are critical (minimal excluded minors) for embeddability in surfaces are studied. In Part I we consider the structure of graphs with a 2-vertex-cut that are critical with respect to the Euler genus. A general theorem describing the building blocks is presented. These constituents, called hoppers and cascades, are classified for the case when Euler genus is small. As a consequence, the complete list of obstructions of connectivity 2 for embedding graphs into the Klein bottle is obtained. This is the first complete result about obstructions for embeddability of graphs in the Klein bo…
A conjecture of Kalai from 1994 posits that for an arbitrary $2\leq k\leq \lfloor d/2 \rfloor$, the combinatorial type of a simplicial $d$-polytope $P$ is uniquely determined by the $(k-1)$-skeleton of $P$ (given as an abstract simplicial complex) together with the space of affine $k$-stresses on $P$. We establish the first non-trivial case of this conjecture, namely, the case of $k=2$. We also prove that for a general $k$, Kalai's conjecture holds for the class of $k$-neighborly polytopes.
If K is an odd-dimensional flag closed manifold, flag generalized homology sphere or a more general flag weak pseudomanifold with sufficiently many vertices, then the maximal number of edges in K is achieved by the balanced join of cycles. The proof relies on stability results from extremal graph theory. In the case of manifolds we also offer an alternative (very) short proof utilizing the non-embeddability theorem of Flores. The main theorem can also be interpreted without the topological contents as a graph-theoretic extremal result about a class of graphs such that 1) every maximal clique i…
Universality theorems (in the sense of N. Mnëv) claim that the realization space of a combinatorial object (a point configuration, a hyperplane arrangement, a convex polytope, etc.) can be arbitrarily complicated. In the paper, we prove a universality theorem for a graph in the plane with a prescribed \textit{oriented matroid of stresses}, that is the collection of signs of all possible equilibrium stresses of the graph. This research is motivated by the Grassmanian stratification (Gelfand, Goresky, MacPherson, Serganova) by thin Schubert cells, and by a recent series of papers on stratificati…
In this article, the bi-Lipschitz embeddability of the sequence of countably branching diamond graphs $(D_k^ω)_{k\in\mathbb{N}}$ is investigated. In particular it is shown that for every $\varepsilon>0$ and $k\in\mathbb{N}$, $D_k^ω$ embeds bi-Lipschiztly with distortion at most $6(1+\varepsilon)$ into any reflexive Banach space with an unconditional asymptotic structure that does not admit an equivalent asymptotically uniformly convex norm. On the other hand it is shown that the sequence $(D_k^ω)_{k\in\mathbb{N}}$ does not admit an equi-bi-Lipschitz embedding into any Banach space that has an …
We show that superreflexivity can be characterized in terms of bilipschitz embeddability of word hyperbolic groups. We compare characterizations of superreflexivity in terms of diamond graphs and binary trees. We show that there exist sequences of series-parallel graphs of increasing topological complexity which admit uniformly bilipschitz embeddings into a Hilbert space, and thus do not characterize superreflexivity.
