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Crossing Number of 3-Plane Drawings

Published: March 11, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2503.08365v1

By: Miriam Goetze , Michael Hoffmann , Ignaz Rutter and more

Potential Business Impact:

Limits how many times lines can cross in drawings.

Business Areas:
Data Visualization Data and Analytics, Design, Information Technology, Software

We study 3-plane drawings, that is, drawings of graphs in which every edge has at most three crossings. We show how the recently developed Density Formula for topological drawings of graphs (KKKRSU GD 2024) can be used to count the crossings in terms of the number $n$ of vertices. As a main result, we show that every 3-plane drawing has at most $5.5(n-2)$ crossings, which is tight. In particular, it follows that every 3-planar graph on $n$ vertices has crossing number at most $5.5n$, which improves upon a recent bound (BBBDHKMOW GD 2024) of $6.6n$. To apply the Density Formula, we carefully analyze the interplay between certain configurations of cells in a 3-plane drawing. As a by-product, we also obtain an alternative proof for the known statement that every 3-planar graph has at most $5.5(n-2)$ edges.

Country of Origin
🇨🇭 🇩🇪 Switzerland, Germany

Page Count
14 pages

Category
Mathematics:
Combinatorics