Tree-width of hypergraphs and surface duality

Abstract

In Graph Minors III, Robertson and Seymour write: "It seems that the tree-width of a planar graph and the tree-width of its geometric dual are approximately equal - indeed, we have convinced ourselves that they differ by at most one". They never gave a proof of this. In this paper, we prove a generalisation of this statement to embedding of hypergraphs on general surfaces, and we prove that our bound is tight.