Polyhedra without disjoint faces
Some research I’ve been doing led me to consider the (prism,
Some definitions:
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Here by the prism graph I mean the graph of the triangular prism. Any other prism has this one as a minor, and so is irrelevant as a forbidden minor. However, the pyramids in this structure can have any polygon as their base, corresponding to wheel graphs with arbitrarily many vertices.
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is a complete bipartite graph with three vertices on each side of its bipartition, famous as the utility graph, one of the two forbidden minors for planar graphs. The triangular prism graph and are the only two 3-regular graphs with six vertices.
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The triconnected components of a graph are the graphs associated with the nodes of its SPQR tree, or of the SPQR trees of its biconnected components. These are cycle graphs, dipole multigraphs, or 3-connected graphs, and by “nontrivial” I mean the ones that are not cycles or dipoles. A triconnected component might not be a subgraph of the given graph, because it can have additional edges that correspond to paths in the given graph. For instance, subdividing the edges of any graph into paths, or more generally replacing edges by arbitrary series-parallel graphs, does not change its set of nontrivial triconnected components.
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I’m using “face” in the usual three-dimensional meaning, a two-dimensional subset of the boundary of the polyhedron. For higher-dimensional polytopes, “face” has a different meaning that also includes vertices and edges, and “facet” would be used to refer to the
-dimensional faces, but using that terminology seems overly pedantic here.
Sketch of proof of the characterization of polyhedra without two disjoint faces: Consider any polyhedron without disjoint faces. If one face shares an edge with all the others, it’s a Halin graph, a graph formed by linking the leaves of a tree into a cycle; if the tree is a star, it’s a pyramid, and otherwise contracting all but one of the interior edges of the tree, and then all but four of the cycle edges, will produce a prism minor. In the remaining case, some two faces share only a vertex
Sketch of a lemma that every convex polyhedron with two disjoint faces has a prism minor: glue a pyramidal cap into each of the two faces, producing a larger convex polyhedron which by either Steinitz’s theorem or Balinski’s theorem is necessarily 3-connected, and find three vertex-disjoint paths between the apexes of the attached pyramids. The parts of these paths outside the two glued pyramids, together with the boundaries of the two faces, form a subdivision of a prism.
Sketch of proof of the characterization of (prism,
In the other direction, suppose that a graph is (prism,
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K. Wagner. Über eine Erweiterung des Satzes von Kuratowski. Deutsche Mathematik, 2:280–285, 1937. ↩
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D. W. Hall. A note on primitive skew curves. Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, 49(12):935–936, 1943. doi:10.1090/ S0002-9904-1943-08065-2. ↩