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We consider facet-Hamiltonian cycles of polytopes, defined as cycles in their skeleton such that every facet is visited exactly once. These cycles can be understood as optimal watchman routes that guard the facets of a polytope. We consider the existence of such cycles for a variety of polytopes, the facets of which have a natural combinatorial interpretation. In particular, we prove the following results: - Every permutahedron has a facet-Hamiltonian cycle. These cycles consist of circular sequences of permutations of $n$ elements, where two successive permutations differ by a single adjacent transposition, and such that every subset of $[n]$ appears as a prefix in a contiguous subsequence. With these cycles we associate what we call rhombic strips which encode interleaved Gray codes of the Boolean lattice, one Gray code for each rank. These rhombic strips correspond to simple Venn diagrams. - Every generalized associahedron has a facet-Hamiltonian cycle. This generalizes the so-called rainbow cycles of Felsner, Kleist, M\"utze, and Sering (SIDMA 2020) to associahedra of any finite type. We relate the constructions to the Conway-Coxeter friezes and the bipartite belts of finite type cluster algebras. - Graph associahedra of wheels, fans, and complete split graphs have facet-Hamiltonian cycles. For associahedra of complete bipartite graphs and caterpillars, we construct facet-Hamiltonian paths. The construction involves new insights on the combinatorics of graph tubings. We also consider the computational complexity of deciding whether a given polytope has a facet-Hamiltonian cycle and show that the problem is NP-complete, even when restricted to simple 3-dimensional polytopes., Comment: ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA'25)

A $k$-height on a graph $G=(V, E)$ is an assignment $V\to\{0, \ldots, k\}$ such that the value on ajacent vertices differs by at most $1$. We study the Markov chain on $k$-heights that in each step selects a vertex at random, and, if admissible, increases or decreases the value at this vertex by one. In the cases of $2$-heights and $3$-heights we show that this Markov chain is rapidly mixing on certain families of grid-like graphs and on planar cubic $3$-connected graphs. The result is based on a novel technique called block coupling, which is derived from the well-established monotone coupling approach. This technique may also be effective when analyzing other Markov chains that operate on configurations of spin systems that form a distributive lattice. It is therefore of independent interest., Comment: 31 pages, 8 figures. Supplemental code available at Zenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.13912818

A conjecture by Rafla from 1988 asserts that every simple drawing of the complete graph $K_n$ admits a plane Hamiltonian cycle. It turned out that already the existence of much simpler non-crossing substructures in such drawings is hard to prove. Recent progress was made by Aichholzer et al. and by Suk and Zeng who proved the existence of a plane path of length $\Omega(\log n / \log \log n)$ and of a plane matching of size $\Omega(n^{1/2})$ in every simple drawing of $K_{n}$. Instead of studying simpler substructures, we prove Rafla's conjecture for the subclass of convex drawings, the most general class in the convexity hierarchy introduced by Arroyo et al. Moreover, we show that every convex drawing of $K_n$ contains a plane Hamiltonian path between each pair of vertices (Hamiltonian connectivity) and a plane $k$-cycle for each $3 \leq k \leq n$ (pancyclicity), and present further results on maximal plane subdrawings., Comment: To appear in the proceedings of the 40th International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG 2024)

Arrangements of pseudolines are classic objects in discrete and computational geometry. They have been studied with increasing intensity since their introduction almost 100 years ago. The study of the number $B_n$ of non-isomorphic simple arrangements of $n$ pseudolines goes back to Goodman and Pollack, Knuth, and others. It is known that $B_n$ is in the order of $2^{\Theta(n^2)}$ and finding asymptotic bounds on $b_n = \frac{\log_2(B_n)}{n^2}$ remains a challenging task. In 2011, Felsner and Valtr showed that $0.1887 \leq b_n \le 0.6571$ for sufficiently large $n$. The upper bound remains untouched but in 2020 Dumitrescu and Mandal improved the lower bound constant to $0.2083$. Their approach utilizes the known values of $B_n$ for up to $n=12$. We tackle the lower bound by utilizing dynamic programming and the Lindstr\"om-Gessel-Viennot lemma. Our new bound is $b_n \geq 0.2721$ for sufficiently large $n$. The result is based on a delicate interplay of theoretical ideas and computer assistance., Comment: This article is to appear in the proceedings of the 40th International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG 2024). It is a merge of the following two independent submissions: 1) Justin Dallant -- Improved Lower Bound on the Number of Pseudoline Arrangements 2) Fernando Cort\'es K\"uhnast, Stefan Felsner, and Manfred Scheucher -- An Improved Lower Bound on the Number of Pseudoline Arrangements

A rectangulation is a decomposition of a rectangle into finitely many rectangles. Via natural equivalence relations, rectangulations can be seen as combinatorial objects with a rich structure, with links to lattice congruences, flip graphs, polytopes, lattice paths, Hopf algebras, etc. In this paper, we first revisit the structure of the respective equivalence classes: weak rectangulations that preserve rectangle-segment adjacencies, and strong rectangulations that preserve rectangle-rectangle adjacencies. We thoroughly investigate posets defined by adjacency in rectangulations of both kinds, and unify and simplify known bijections between rectangulations and permutation classes. This yields a uniform treatment of mappings between permutations and rectangulations that unifies the results from earlier contributions, and emphasizes parallelism and differences between the weak and the strong cases. Then, we consider the special case of guillotine rectangulations, and prove that they can be characterized - under all known mappings between permutations and rectangulations - by avoidance of two mesh patterns that correspond to "windmills" in rectangulations. This yields new permutation classes in bijection with weak guillotine rectangulations, and the first known permutation class in bijection with strong guillotine rectangulations. Finally, we address enumerative issues and prove asymptotic bounds for several families of strong rectangulations., Comment: 43 pages, 31 figures

Flip graphs of combinatorial and geometric objects are at the heart of many deep structural insights and connections between different branches of discrete mathematics and computer science. They also provide a natural framework for the study of reconfiguration problems. We study flip graphs of arrangements of pseudolines and of arrangements of pseudocircles, which are combinatorial generalizations of lines and circles, respectively. In both cases we consider triangle flips as local transformation and prove conjectures regarding their connectivity. In the case of $n$ pseudolines we show that the connectivity of the flip graph equals its minimum degree, which is exactly $n-2$. For the proof we introduce the class of shellable line arrangements, which serve as reference objects for the construction of disjoint paths. In fact, shellable arrangements are elements of a flip graph of line arrangements which are vertices of a polytope (Felsner and Ziegler; DM 241 (2001), 301--312). This polytope forms a cluster of good connectivity in the flip graph of pseudolines. In the case of pseudocircles we show that triangle flips induce a connected flip graph on \emph{intersecting} arrangements and also on cylindrical intersecting arrangements. The result for cylindrical arrangements is used in the proof for intersecting arrangements. We also show that in both settings the diameter of the flip graph is in $\Theta(n^3)$. Our constructions make essential use of variants of the sweeping lemma for pseudocircle arrangements (Snoeyink and Hershberger; Proc.\ SoCG 1989: 354--363). We finally study cylindrical arrangements in their own right and provide new combinatorial characterizations of this class.

We consider bichromatic point sets with $n$ red and $n$ blue points and study straight-line bichromatic perfect matchings on them. We show that every such point set in convex position admits a matching with at least $\frac{3n^2}{8}-\frac{n}{2}+c$ crossings, for some $ -\frac{1}{2} \leq c \leq \frac{1}{8}$. This bound is tight since for any $k> \frac{3n^2}{8} -\frac{n}{2}+\frac{1}{8}$ there exist bichromatic point sets that do not admit any perfect matching with $k$ crossings., Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 31st International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2023)

In 1988 Rafla conjectured that every simple drawing of a complete graph $K_n$ contains a plane, i.e., non-crossing, Hamiltonian cycle. The conjecture is far from being resolved. The lower bounds for plane paths and plane matchings have recently been raised to $(\log n)^{1-o(1)}$ and $\Omega(\sqrt{n})$, respectively. We develop a SAT framework which allows the study of simple drawings of $K_n$. Based on the computational data we conjecture that every simple drawing of $K_n$ contains a plane Hamiltonian subgraph with $2n-3$ edges. We prove this strengthening of Rafla's conjecture for convex drawings, a rich subclass of simple drawings. Our computer experiments also led to other new challenging conjectures regarding plane substructures in simple drawings of complete graphs.

In 1926, Levi showed that, for every pseudoline arrangement $\mathcal{A}$ and two points in the plane, $\mathcal{A}$ can be extended by a pseudoline which contains the two prescribed points. Later extendability was studied for arrangements of pseudohyperplanes in higher dimensions. While the extendability of an arrangement of proper hyperplanes in $\mathbb{R}^d$ with a hyperplane containing $d$ prescribed points is trivial, Richter-Gebert found an arrangement of pseudoplanes in $\mathbb{R}^3$ which cannot be extended with a pseudoplane containing two particular prescribed points. In this article, we investigate the extendability of signotopes, which are a combinatorial structure encoding a rich subclass of pseudohyperplane arrangements. Our main result is that signotopes of odd rank are extendable in the sense that for two prescribed crossing points we can add an element containing them. Moreover, we conjecture that in all even ranks $r \geq 4$ there exist signotopes which are not extendable for two prescribed points. Our conjecture is supported by examples in ranks 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12 that were found with a SAT based approach., Comment: Full version of a paper to appear in a shorter form in the 39th International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG 2023)

A finite set $P$ of points in the plane is $n$-universal with respect to a class $\mathcal{C}$ of planar graphs if every $n$-vertex graph in $\mathcal{C}$ admits a crossing-free straight-line drawing with vertices at points of $P$. For the class of all planar graphs the best known upper bound on the size of a universal point set is quadratic and the best known lower bound is linear in $n$. Some classes of planar graphs are known to admit universal point sets of near linear size, however, there are no truly linear bounds for interesting classes beyond outerplanar graphs. In this paper, we show that there is a universal point set of size $2n-2$ for the class of bipartite planar graphs with $n$ vertices. The same point set is also universal for the class of $n$-vertex planar graphs of maximum degree $3$. The point set used for the results is what we call an exploding double chain, and we prove that this point set allows planar straight-line embeddings of many more planar graphs, namely of all subgraphs of planar graphs admitting a one-sided Hamiltonian cycle. The result for bipartite graphs also implies that every $n$-vertex plane graph has a $1$-bend drawing all whose bends and vertices are contained in a specific point set of size $4n-6$, this improves a bound of $6n-10$ for the same problem by L\"offler and T\'oth.

We continue the study of linear layouts of graphs in relation to known data structures. At a high level, given a data structure, the goal is to find a linear order of the vertices of the graph and a partition of its edges into pages, such that the edges in each page follow the restriction of the given data structure in the underlying order. In this regard, the most notable representatives are the stack and queue layouts, while there exists some work also for deques. In this paper, we study linear layouts of graphs that follow the restriction of a restricted-input queue (rique), in which insertions occur only at the head, and removals occur both at the head and the tail. We characterize the graphs admitting rique layouts with a single page and we use the characterization to derive a corresponding testing algorithm when the input graph is maximal planar. We finally give bounds on the number of needed pages (so-called rique-number) of complete graphs., Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 30th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2022)

In this article, we study the cell-structure of simple arrangements of pairwise intersecting pseudocircles. The focus will be on two problems from Gr\"unbaum's monograph from the 1970's. First, we discuss the maximum number of digons or touching points. Gr\"unbaum conjectured that there are at most $2n-2$ digon cells or equivalently at most $2n-2$ touchings. Agarwal et al. (2004) verified the conjecture for cylindrical arrangements. We show that the conjecture holds for any arrangement which contains three pseudocircles that pairwise form a touching. The proof makes use of the result for cylindrical arrangements. Moreover, we construct non-cylindrical arrangements which attain the maximum of $2n-2$ touchings and have no triple of pairwise touching pseudocircles. Second, we discuss the minimum number of triangular cells (triangles) in arrangements without digons and touchings. Felsner and Scheucher (2017) showed that there exist arrangements with only $\lceil \frac{16}{11}n \rceil$ triangles, which disproved a conjecture of Gr\"unbaum. Here we provide a construction with only $\lceil \frac{4}{3}n \rceil$ triangles. A corresponding lower bound was obtained by Snoeyink and Hershberger (1991)., Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 30th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2022)

Felsner, Hurtado, Noy and Streinu (2000) conjectured that arrangement graphs of simple great-circle arrangements have chromatic number at most $3$. Motivated by this conjecture, we study the colorability of arrangement graphs for different classes of arrangements of (pseudo-)circles. In this paper the conjecture is verified for $\triangle$-saturated pseudocircle arrangements, i.e., for arrangements where one color class of the 2-coloring of faces consists of triangles only, as well as for further classes of (pseudo-)circle arrangements. These results are complemented by a construction which maps $\triangle$-saturated arrangements with a pentagonal face to arrangements with 4-chromatic 4-regular arrangement graphs. This "corona" construction has similarities with the crowning construction introduced by Koester (1985). Based on exhaustive experiments with small arrangements we propose three strengthenings of the original conjecture. We also investigate fractional colorings. It is shown that the arrangement graph of every arrangement $\mathcal{A}$ of pairwise intersecting pseudocircles is "close" to being $3$-colorable. More precisely, the fractional chromatic number $\chi_f(\mathcal{A})$ of the arrangement graph is bounded from above by $\chi_f(\mathcal{A}) \le 3+O(\frac{1}{n})$, where $n$ is the number of pseudocircles of $\mathcal{A}$. Furthermore, we construct an infinite family of $4$-edge-critical $4$-regular planar graphs which are fractionally $3$-colorable. This disproves a conjecture of Gimbel, K\"{u}ndgen, Li, and Thomassen (2019)., Comment: 21 pages, 15 figures. An extended abstract of this work has appeared in the proceedings of EUROCOMB 2021

A \emph{generic rectangular layout} (for short, \emph{layout}) is a subdivision of an axis-aligned rectangle into axis-aligned rectangles, no four of which have a point in common. Such layouts are used in data visualization and in cartography. The contacts between the rectangles represent semantic or geographic relations. A layout is weakly (strongly) \emph{aspect ratio universal} if any assignment of aspect ratios to rectangles can be realized by a weakly (strongly) equivalent layout. We give combinatorial characterizations for weakly and strongly aspect ratio universal layouts. Furthermore, we describe a quadratic-time algorithm that decides whether a given graph is the dual graph of a strongly aspect ratio universal layout, and finds such a layout if one exists., Comment: 25 pages, 12 figures, full version of a 12-page extended abstract to appear in WALCOM 2022

Bundling crossings is a strategy which can enhance the readability of drawings. In this paper we consider good drawings, i.e., we require that any two edges have at most one common point which can be a common vertex or a crossing. Our main result is that there is a polynomial time algorithm to compute an 8-approximation of the bundled crossing number of a good drawing (up to adding a term depending on the facial structure of the drawing). In the special case of circular drawings the approximation factor is 8 (no extra term), this improves upon the 10-approximation of Fink et al. (Bundled crossings in embedded graphs, Proc. Latin'16). Our approach also works with the same approximation factor for families of pseudosegments, i.e., curves intersecting at most once. We also show how to compute a 9/2-approximation when the intersection graph of the pseudosegments is bipartite.

The queue-number of a poset is the queue-number of its cover graph viewed as a directed acyclic graph, i.e., when the vertex order must be a linear extension of the poset. Heath and Pemmaraju conjectured that every poset of width $w$ has queue-number at most $w$. Recently, Alam et al. constructed posets of width $w$ with queue-number $w+1$. Our contribution is a construction of posets with width $w$ with queue-number $\Omega(w^2)$. This asymptotically matches the known upper bound., Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 29th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2021)

A page (queue) with respect to a vertex ordering of a graph is a set of edges such that no two edges cross (nest), i.e., have their endpoints ordered in an ABAB-pattern (ABBA-pattern). A union page (union queue) is a vertex-disjoint union of pages (queues). The union page number (union queue number) of a graph is the smallest $ k $ such that there is a vertex ordering and a partition of the edges into $ k $ union pages (union queues). The local page number (local queue number) is the smallest $ k $ for which there is a vertex ordering and a partition of the edges into pages (queues) such that each vertex has incident edges in at most $ k $ pages (queues). We present upper and lower bounds on these four parameters for the complete graph $ K_n $ on $ n $ vertices. In three cases we obtain the exact result up to an additive constant. In particular, the local page number of $ K_n $ is $ n/3 \pm O(1) $, while its local and union queue number is $ (1-1/\sqrt{2})n \pm O(1) $. The union page number of $ K_n $ is between $ n/3 - O(1) $ and $ 4n/9 + O(1) $., Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 29th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2021)

We study reconfiguration of independent sets in interval graphs under the token sliding rule. We show that if two independent sets of size $k$ are reconfigurable in an $n$-vertex interval graph, then there is a reconfiguration sequence of length $\mathcal{O}(k\cdot n^2)$. We also provide a construction in which the shortest reconfiguration sequence is of length $\Omega(k^2\cdot n)$. As a counterpart to these results, we also establish that $\textsf{Independent Set Reconfiguration}$ is PSPACE-hard on incomparability graphs, of which interval graphs are a special case., Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures

A star-simple drawing of a graph is a drawing in which adjacent edges do not cross. In contrast, there is no restriction on the number of crossings between two independent edges. When allowing empty lenses (a face in the arrangement induced by two edges that is bounded by a 2-cycle), two independent edges may cross arbitrarily many times in a star-simple drawing. We consider star-simple drawings of $K_n$ with no empty lens. In this setting we prove an upper bound of $3((n-4)!)$ on the maximum number of crossings between any pair of edges. It follows that the total number of crossings is finite and upper bounded by $n!$., Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 28th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2020)

Planar bipartite graphs can be represented as touching graphs of horizontal and vertical segments in $\mathbb{R}^2$. We study a generalization in space: touching graphs of axis-aligned rectangles in $\mathbb{R}^3$, and prove that planar 3-colorable graphs can be represented this way. The result implies a characterization of corner polytopes previously obtained by Eppstein and Mumford. A by-product of our proof is a distributive lattice structure on the set of orthogonal surfaces with given skeleton. Further, we study representations by axis-aligned non-coplanar rectangles in $\mathbb{R}^3$ such that all regions are boxes. We show that the resulting graphs correspond to octahedrations of an octahedron. This generalizes the correspondence between planar quadrangulations and families of horizontal and vertical segments in $\mathbb{R}^2$ with the property that all regions are rectangles., Comment: Keywords: Touching graphs, contact graphs, boxicity, planar graphs

In this article we discuss classical theorems from Convex Geometry in the context of topological drawings and beyond. In a simple topological drawing of the complete graph $K_n$, any two edges share at most one point: either a common vertex or a point where they cross. Triangles of simple topological drawings can be viewed as convex sets. This gives a link to convex geometry. As our main result, we present a generalization of Kirchberger's Theorem that is of purely combinatorial nature. It turned out that this classical theorem also applies to "generalized signotopes" - a combinatorial generalization of simple topological drawings, which we introduce and investigate in the course of this article. As indicated by the name they are a generalization of signotopes, a structure studied in the context of encodings for arrangements of pseudolines. We also present a family of simple topological drawings with arbitrarily large Helly number, and a new proof of a topological generalization of Carath\'{e}odory's Theorem in the plane and discuss further classical theorems from Convex Geometry in the context of simple topological drawings., Comment: A preliminary version appears in the Proceedings of the 28th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2020). The reverse direction of Theorem 1 does not hold. The comment directly after the theorem is now corrected and a counterexample is presented

Representations of planar triangulations as contact graphs of a set of internally disjoint homothetic triangles or of a set of internally disjoint homothetic squares have received quite some attention in recent years. In this paper we investigate representations of planar triangulations as contact graphs of a set of internally disjoint homothetic pentagons. Surprisingly such a representation exists for every triangulation whose outer face is a 5-gon. We relate these representations to five color forests. These combinatorial structures resemble Schnyder woods and transversal structures, respectively. In particular there is a bijection to certain alpha-orientations and consequently a lattice structure on the set of five color forests of a given graph. This lattice structure plays a role in an algorithm that is supposed to compute a contact representation with pentagons for a given graph. Based on a five color forest the algorithm builds a system of linear equations and solves it, if the solution is non-negative, it encodes distances between corners of a pentagon representation. In this case the representation is constructed and the algorithm terminates. Otherwise negative variables guide a change of the five color forest and the procedure is restarted with the new five color forest. Similar algorithms have been proposed for contact representations with homothetic triangles and with squares.

We consider arrangements of $n$ pseudo-lines in the Euclidean plane where each pseudo-line $\ell_i$ is represented by a bi-infinite connected $x$-monotone curve $f_i(x)$, $x \in \mathbb{R}$, s.t.\ for any two pseudo-lines $\ell_i$ and $\ell_j$ with $i < j$, the function $x \mapsto f_j(x) - f_i(x)$ is monotonically decreasing and surjective (i.e., the pseudo-lines approach each other until they cross, and then move away from each other). We show that such \emph{arrangements of approaching pseudo-lines}, under some aspects, behave similar to arrangements of lines, while for other aspects, they share the freedom of general pseudo-line arrangements. For the former, we prove: 1. There are arrangements of pseudo-lines that are not realizable with approaching pseudo-lines. 2. Every arrangement of approaching pseudo-lines has a dual generalized configuration of points with an underlying arrangement of approaching pseudo-lines. For the latter, we show: 1. There are $2^{\Theta(n^2)}$ isomorphism classes of arrangements of approaching pseudo-lines (while there are only $2^{\Theta(n \log n)}$ isomorphism classes of line arrangements). 2. It can be decided in polynomial time whether an allowable sequence is realizable by an arrangement of approaching pseudo-lines. Furthermore, arrangements of approaching pseudo-lines can be transformed into each other by flipping triangular cells, i.e., they have a connected flip graph, and every bichromatic arrangement of this type contains a bichromatic triangular cell.

We study covering numbers and local covering numbers with respect to difference graphs and complete bipartite graphs. In particular we show that in every cover of a Young diagram with $\binom{2k}{k}$ steps with generalized rectangles there is a row or a column in the diagram that is used by at least $k+1$ rectangles, and prove that this is best-possible. This answers two questions by Kim, Martin, Masa{\v{r}}{\'\i}k, Shull, Smith, Uzzell, and Wang (Europ. J. Comb. 2020), namely: - What is the local complete bipartite cover number of a difference graph? - Is there a sequence of graphs with constant local difference graph cover number and unbounded local complete bipartite cover number? We add to the study of these local covering numbers with a lower bound construction and some examples. Following Kim \emph{et al.}, we use the results on local covering numbers to provide lower and upper bounds for the local dimension of partially ordered sets of height~2. We discuss the local dimension of some posets related to Boolean lattices and show that the poset induced by the first two layers of the Boolean lattice has local dimension $(1 + o(1))\log_2\log_2 n$. We conclude with some remarks on covering numbers for digraphs and Ferrers dimension., Comment: Parts of this paper have previously been reported in arXiv submission arXiv:1902.08223

Let ${\cal L}$ be an arrangement of $n$ lines in the Euclidean plane. The \emph{$k$-level} of ${\cal L}$ consists of all vertices $v$ of the arrangement which have exactly $k$ lines of ${\cal L}$ passing below $v$. The complexity (the maximum size) of the $k$-level in a line arrangement has been widely studied. In 1998 Dey proved an upper bound of $O(n\cdot (k+1)^{1/3})$. Due to the correspondence between lines in the plane and great-circles on the sphere, the asymptotic bounds carry over to arrangements of great-circles on the sphere, where the $k$-level denotes the vertices at distance at most $k$ to a marked cell, the \emph{south pole}. We prove an upper bound of $O((k+1)^2)$ on the expected complexity of the $k$-level in great-circle arrangements if the south pole is chosen uniformly at random among all cells. We also consider arrangements of great $(d-1)$-spheres on the sphere $\mathbb{S}^d$ which are orthogonal to a set of random points on $\mathbb{S}^d$. In this model, we prove that the expected complexity of the $k$-level is of order $\Theta((k+1)^{d-1})$.

A measure for the visual complexity of a straight-line crossing-free drawing of a graph is the minimum number of lines needed to cover all vertices. For a given graph $G$, the minimum such number (over all drawings in dimension $d \in \{2,3\}$) is called the \emph{$d$-dimensional weak line cover number} and denoted by $\pi^1_d(G)$. In 3D, the minimum number of \emph{planes} needed to cover all vertices of~$G$ is denoted by $\pi^2_3(G)$. When edges are also required to be covered, the corresponding numbers $\rho^1_d(G)$ and $\rho^2_3(G)$ are called the \emph{(strong) line cover number} and the \emph{(strong) plane cover number}. Computing any of these cover numbers -- except $\pi^1_2(G)$ -- is known to be NP-hard. The complexity of computing $\pi^1_2(G)$ was posed as an open problem by Chaplick et al. [WADS 2017]. We show that it is NP-hard to decide, for a given planar graph~$G$, whether $\pi^1_2(G)=2$. We further show that the universal stacked triangulation of depth~$d$, $G_d$, has $\pi^1_2(G_d)=d+1$. Concerning~3D, we show that any $n$-vertex graph~$G$ with $\rho^2_3(G)=2$ has at most $5n-19$ edges, which is tight., Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 27th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2019)

We show that 4-connected plane triangulations can be redrawn such that edges are represented by straight segments and the vertices are covered by a set of at most $\sqrt{2n}$ lines each of them horizontal or vertical. The same holds for all subgraphs of such triangulations. The proof is based on a corresponding result for diagrams of planar lattices which makes use of orthogonal chain and antichain families., Comment: This is the full version. Version 1 is an extended abstract which appears in the Proceedings of GD 2019

A vertex coloring $\phi$ of a graph $G$ is $p$-centered if for every connected subgraph $H$ of $G$ either $\phi$ uses more than $p$ colors on $H$ or there is a color that appears exactly once on $H$. Centered colorings form one of the families of parameters that allow to capture notions of sparsity of graphs: A class of graphs has bounded expansion if and only if there is a function $f$ such that for every $p\geq1$, every graph in the class admits a $p$-centered coloring using at most $f(p)$ colors. In this paper, we give upper bounds for the maximum number of colors needed in a $p$-centered coloring of graphs from several widely studied graph classes. We show that: (1) planar graphs admit $p$-centered colorings with $\mathcal{O}(p^3\log p)$ colors where the previous bound was $\mathcal{O}(p^{19})$; (2) bounded degree graphs admit $p$-centered colorings with $\mathcal{O}(p)$ colors while it was conjectured that they may require exponential number of colors in $p$; (3) graphs avoiding a fixed graph as a topological minor admit $p$-centered colorings with a polynomial in $p$ number of colors. All these upper bounds imply polynomial algorithms for computing the colorings. Prior to this work there were no non-trivial lower bounds known. We show that: (4) there are graphs of treewidth $t$ that require $\binom{p+t}{t}$ colors in any $p$-centered coloring and this bound matches the upper bound; (5) there are planar graphs that require $\Omega(p^2\log p)$ colors in any $p$-centered coloring.

We study two parameters that arise from the dichromatic number and the vertex-arboricity in the same way that the achromatic number comes from the chromatic number. The adichromatic number of a digraph is the largest number of colors its vertices can be colored with such that every color induces an acyclic subdigraph but merging any two colors yields a monochromatic directed cycle. Similarly, the a-vertex arboricity of an undirected graph is the largest number of colors that can be used such that every color induces a forest but merging any two yields a monochromatic cycle. We study the relation between these parameters and their behavior with respect to other classical parameters such as degeneracy and most importantly feedback vertex sets., Comment: 17 pages, no figures

A strict orthogonal drawing of a graph $G=(V, E)$ in $\mathbb{R}^2$ is a drawing of $G$ such that each vertex is mapped to a distinct point and each edge is mapped to a horizontal or vertical line segment. A graph $G$ is $HV$-restricted if each of its edges is assigned a horizontal or vertical orientation. A strict orthogonal drawing of an $HV$-restricted graph $G$ is good if it is planar and respects the edge orientations of $G$. In this paper, we give a polynomial-time algorithm to check whether a given $HV$-restricted plane graph (i.e., a planar graph with a fixed combinatorial embedding) admits a good orthogonal drawing preserving the input embedding, which settles an open question posed by Ma\v{n}uch et al. (Graph Drawing 2010). We then examine $HV$-restricted planar graphs (i.e., when the embedding is not fixed), and give a complete characterization of the $HV$-restricted biconnected outerplanar graphs that admit good orthogonal drawings., Comment: 17 pages, 9 figures

We give a new combinatorial proof for the number of convex polyominoes whose minimum enclosing rectangle has given dimensions. We also count the subclass of these polyominoes that contain the lower left corner of the enclosing rectangle (directed polyominoes). We indicate how to sample random polyominoes in these classes. As a side result, we calculate the first and second moments of the number of common points of two monotone lattice paths between two given points., Comment: 18 pages, 8 figures

We prove that in every cover of a Young diagram with $\binom{2k}{k}$ steps with generalized rectangles there is a row or a column in the diagram that is used by at least $k+1$ rectangles. We show that this is best-possible by partitioning any Young diagram with $\binom{2k}{k}-1$ steps into actual rectangles, each row and each column used by at most $k$ rectangles. This answers two questions by Kim et al. (2018). Our results can be rephrased in terms of local covering numbers of difference graphs with complete bipartite graphs, which has applications in the recent notion of local dimension of partially ordered sets.

The flip graph of triangulations has as vertices all triangulations of a convex $n$-gon, and an edge between any two triangulations that differ in exactly one edge. An $r$-rainbow cycle in this graph is a cycle in which every inner edge of the triangulation appears exactly $r$ times. This notion of a rainbow cycle extends in a natural way to other flip graphs. In this paper we investigate the existence of $r$-rainbow cycles for three different flip graphs on classes of geometric objects: the aforementioned flip graph of triangulations of a convex $n$-gon, the flip graph of plane trees on an arbitrary set of $n$ points, and the flip graph of non-crossing perfect matchings on a set of $n$ points in convex position. In addition, we consider two flip graphs on classes of non-geometric objects: the flip graph of permutations of $\{1,2,\dots,n\}$ and the flip graph of $k$-element subsets of $\{1,2,\dots,n\}$. In each of the five settings, we prove the existence and non-existence of rainbow cycles for different values of $r$, $n$ and~$k$.

An arrangement of pseudocircles is a collection of simple closed curves on the sphere or in the plane such that any two of the curves are either disjoint or intersect in exactly two crossing points. We call an arrangement intersecting if every pair of pseudocircles intersects twice. An arrangement is circularizable if there is a combinatorially equivalent arrangement of circles. In this paper we present the results of the first thorough study of circularizability. We show that there are exactly four non-circularizable arrangements of 5 pseudocircles (one of them was known before). In the set of 2131 digon-free intersecting arrangements of 6 pseudocircles we identify the three non-circularizable examples. We also show non-circularizability of 8 additional arrangements of 6 pseudocircles which have a group of symmetries of size at least 4. Most of our non-circularizability proofs depend on incidence theorems like Miquel's. In other cases we contradict circularizability by considering a continuous deformation where the circles of an assumed circle representation grow or shrink in a controlled way. The claims that we have all non-circularizable arrangements with the given properties are based on a program that generated all arrangements up to a certain size. Given the complete lists of arrangements, we used heuristics to find circle representations. Examples where the heuristics failed were examined by hand., Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 26th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2018)

A pseudocircle is a simple closed curve on the sphere or in the plane. The study of arrangements of pseudocircles was initiated by Gr\"unbaum, who defined them as collections of simple closed curves that pairwise intersect in exactly two crossings. Gr\"unbaum conjectured that the number of triangular cells $p_3$ in digon-free arrangements of $n$ pairwise intersecting pseudocircles is at least $2n-4$. We present examples to disprove this conjecture. With a recursive construction based on an example with $12$ pseudocircles and $16$ triangles we obtain a family with $p_3(\mathcal{A})/n \to 16/11 = 1.\overline{45}$. We expect that the lower bound $p_3(\mathcal{A}) \geq 4n/3$ is tight for infinitely many simple arrangements. It may however be true that all digon-free arrangements of $n$ pairwise intersecting circles have at least $2n-4$ triangles. For pairwise intersecting arrangements with digons we have a lower bound of $p_3 \geq 2n/3$, and conjecture that $p_3 \geq n-1$. Concerning the maximum number of triangles in pairwise intersecting arrangements of pseudocircles, we show that $p_3 \le 2n^2/3 +O(n)$. This is essentially best possible because there are families of pairwise intersecting arrangements of $n$ pseudocircles with $p_3/n^2 \to 2/3$. The paper contains many drawings of arrangements of pseudocircles and a good fraction of these drawings was produced automatically from the combinatorial data produced by our generation algorithm. In the final section we describe some aspects of the drawing algorithm., Comment: In the Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2017), pages 127--139, LNCS 10692, Springer, 2017

The dimension is a key measure of complexity of partially ordered sets. Small dimension allows succinct encoding. Indeed if $P$ has dimension $d$, then to know whether $x \leq y$ in $P$ it is enough to check whether $x\leq y$ in each of the $d$ linear extensions of a witnessing realizer. Focusing on the encoding aspect Ne\v{s}et\v{r}il and Pudl\'{a}k defined a more expressive version of dimension. A poset $P$ has boolean dimension at most $d$ if it is possible to decide whether $x \leq y$ in $P$ by looking at the relative position of $x$ and $y$ in only $d$ permutations of the elements of $P$. We prove that posets with cover graphs of bounded tree-width have bounded boolean dimension. This stays in contrast with the fact that there are posets with cover graphs of tree-width three and arbitrarily large dimension. This result might be a step towards a resolution of the long-standing open problem: Do planar posets have bounded boolean dimension?, Comment: one more reference added; paper revised along the suggestion of three reviewers

Research about crossings is typically about minimization. In this paper, we consider \emph{maximizing} the number of crossings over all possible ways to draw a given graph in the plane. Alpert et al. [Electron. J. Combin., 2009] conjectured that any graph has a \emph{convex} straight-line drawing, e.g., a drawing with vertices in convex position, that maximizes the number of edge crossings. We disprove this conjecture by constructing a planar graph on twelve vertices that allows a non-convex drawing with more crossings than any convex one. Bald et al. [Proc. COCOON, 2016] showed that it is NP-hard to compute the maximum number of crossings of a geometric graph and that the weighted geometric case is NP-hard to approximate. We strengthen these results by showing hardness of approximation even for the unweighted geometric case and prove that the unweighted topological case is NP-hard., Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures

A classic result of Asplund and Gr\"unbaum states that intersection graphs of axis-aligned rectangles in the plane are $\chi$-bounded. This theorem can be equivalently stated in terms of path-decompositions as follows: There exists a function $f:\mathbb{N}\to\mathbb{N}$ such that every graph that has two path-decompositions such that each bag of the first decomposition intersects each bag of the second in at most $k$ vertices has chromatic number at most $f(k)$. Recently, Dujmovi\'c, Joret, Morin, Norin, and Wood asked whether this remains true more generally for two tree-decompositions. In this note we provide a negative answer: There are graphs with arbitrarily large chromatic number for which one can find two tree-decompositions such that each bag of the first decomposition intersects each bag of the second in at most two vertices. Furthermore, this remains true even if one of the two decompositions is restricted to be a path-decomposition. This is shown using a construction of triangle-free graphs with unbounded chromatic number due to Burling, which we believe should be more widely known., Comment: v3: minor changes made following comments by the referees, v2: minor edits

We apply Ramsey theoretic tools to show that there is a family of graphs which have tree-chromatic number at most~$2$ while the path-chromatic number is unbounded. This resolves a problem posed by Seymour., Comment: reviewers comments included

We consider several classes of intersection graphs of line segments in the plane and prove new equality and separation results between those classes. In particular, we show that: (1) intersection graphs of grounded segments and intersection graphs of downward rays form the same graph class, (2) not every intersection graph of rays is an intersection graph of downward rays, and (3) not every intersection graph of rays is an outer segment graph. The first result answers an open problem posed by Cabello and Jej\v{c}i\v{c}. The third result confirms a conjecture by Cabello. We thereby completely elucidate the remaining open questions on the containment relations between these classes of segment graphs. We further characterize the complexity of the recognition problems for the classes of outer segment, grounded segment, and ray intersection graphs. We prove that these recognition problems are complete for the existential theory of the reals. This holds even if a 1-string realization is given as additional input., Comment: 16 pages 12 Figures