Drawing Graphs on Surfaces
Heather Jordon
Associate Professor of Mathematics
Mathematics & Computer Science
Albion College
A graph G consists of two sets, a finite nonempty set V of vertices and a set E of edges, where
each edge is an unordered pair of distinct vertices. When we draw a graph, we want edges to intersect only at vertices, called an embedding of the graph. It turns out that not every graph can be embedded in the plane but every graph can be embedded in 3-dimensional space (even with straight line segments for edges). In this talk, we will discuss drawing
graphs on surfaces that are "in between" the plane and 3-dimensional space. These surfaces will be compact 2-manifolds, and may orientable or non-orientable.