Blossoming bijection for higher-genus maps

Abstract

In 1997, Schaeffer described a bijection between Eulerian planar maps and some trees. In this work we generalize his work to a bijection between bicolorable maps on a surface of any fixed genus and some unicellular maps with the same genus. An important step of this construction is to exhibit a canonical orientation for maps, that allows to apply the same local opening algorithm as Schaeffer. As an important byproduct, we obtain the first bijective proof of a result of Bender and Canfield from 1991, when they proved that the generating series of maps in higher genus is a rational function of the generating series of planar maps.

This is the long version of this work. It is 29 pages long and has 15 figures. This work will be presented in a talk at FPSAC 2018