A counter-example to ‘Wagner's conjecture’ for infinite graphs

Abstract

Wagner made the conjecture that given an infinite sequence G1, G2, … of finite graphs there are indices i < j such that Gi is a minor of Gj. (A graph is a minor of another if the first can be obtained by contraction from a subgraph of the second.) The importance of this conjecture is that it yields excluded minor theorems in graph theory, where by an excluded minor theorem we mean a result asserting that a graph possesses a specified property if and only if none of its minors belongs to a finite list of ‘forbidden minors’. A widely known example of an excluded minor theorem is Kuratowski's famous theorem on planar graphs; one of its formulations says that a graph is planar if and only if it has neither K5 nor K3, 3 as a minor. But several other excluded minor theorems have been discovered by now (see e.g. [7–9]).