3-regular colored graphs and classification of surfaces

Abstract

Motivated by the theory of crystallizations, we consider an equivalence relation on the class of $3$-regular colored graphs and prove that up to this equivalence (a) there exists a unique contracted 3-regular colored graph if the number of vertices is $4m$ and (b) there are exactly two such graphs if the number of vertices is $4m+2$ for each $m\ge 1$. Using this, we present a simple proof of the classification of closed surfaces.

arXiv comment9 pages, 8 figures, Minor update. To appear in Discrete & Computational Geometry

Cited by in corpus (1)

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