Crossing Numbers of Graphs with Rotation Systems Michael J. Pelsmajer∗ Marcus Schaefer Department of Applied Mathematics Department of Computer Science Illinois Institute of Technology DePaul University Chicago, Illinois 60616, USA Chicago, Illinois 60604, USA
[email protected] [email protected] Daniel Štefankovič Computer Science Department University of Rochester Rochester, NY 14627-0226
[email protected] July 1, 2009 Abstract We show that computing the crossing number and the odd crossing number of a graph with a given rotation system is NP-complete. As a consequence we can show that many of the well-known crossing number notions are NP-complete even if restricted to cubic graphs (with or without rotation system). In particular, we can show that Tutte’s independent odd crossing number is NP-complete, and we obtain a new and simpler proof of Hliněný’s result that computing the crossing number of a cubic graph is NP-complete. We also consider the special case of multigraphs with rotation sys- tems on a fixed number k of vertices. For k =1 we give an O(m log m) algorithm, where m is the number of edges, and for loopless multi- graphs on 2 vertices we present a linear time 2-approximation algo- rithm. In both cases there are interesting connections to edit-distance problems on (cyclic) strings. For larger k we show how to approximate k+4 k the crossing number to within a factor of 4 /5 in time O(m log m) on a graph with m edges. ∗ Partially supported by NSA Grant H98230-08-1-0043.