Counting Hamiltonian cycles in 2-tiled graphs

Abstract

In 1930, Kuratowski showed that $K_{3,3}$ and $K_5$ are the only two minor-minimal non-planar graphs. Robertson and Seymour extended finiteness of the set of forbidden minors for any surface. Širáň and Kochol showed that there are infinitely many $k$-crossing-critical graphs for any $k\ge 2$, even if restricted to simple $3$-connected graphs. Recently, $2$-crossing-critical graphs have been completely characterized by Bokal, Oporowski, Richter, and Salazar. We present a simplified description of large 2-crossing-critical graphs and use this simplification to count Hamiltonian cycles in such graphs. We generalize this approach to an algorithm counting Hamiltonian cycles in all 2-tiled graphs, thus extending the results of Bodroža-Pantić, Kwong, Doroslovački, and Pantić for $n=2$.

19 pages