z-Knotted Triangulations of Surfaces

Abstract

AbstractA zigzag in a map (a 2-cell embedding of a connected graph in a connected closed 2-dimensional surface) is a cyclic sequence of edges satisfying the following conditions: (1) any two consecutive edges lie on the same face and have a common vertex, (2) for any three consecutive edges the first and the third edges are disjoint and the face containing the first and the second edges is distinct from the face which contains the second and the third one. A map is z-knotted if it contains a single zigzag. Such maps are closely related to the Gauss code problem and have nice homological properties. We show that every triangulation of a connected closed 2-dimensional surface admits a z-knotted shredding.