Maximum Genus of the Jenga Like Configurations

We treat the boundary of the union of blocks in the Jenga game as a surface with a polyhedral structure and consider its genus. We generalize the game and determine the maximum genus among the configurations in the generalized game.

MAXIMUM GENUS EMBEDDINGS OF LATIN SQUARES

It is proved that every non-trivial Latin square has an upper embedding in a non-orientable surface and every Latin square of odd order has an upper embedding in an orientable surface. In the latter case, detailed results about the possible automorphisms and their actions are also obtained.

Matchings, Cycle Bases, and the Maximum Genus of a Graph

We study the interplay between the maximum genus of a graph and bases of its cycle space via the corresponding intersection graph. Our main results show that the matching number of the intersection graph is independent of the basis precisely when the graph is upper-embeddable, and completely describe the range of matching numbers when the graph is not upper-embeddable. Particular attention is paid to cycle bases consisting of fundamental cycles with respect to a given spanning tree. For $4$-edge-connected graphs, the intersection graph with respect to any spanning tree (and, in fact, with respect to any basis) has either a perfect matching or a matching missing exactly one vertex. We show that if a graph is not $4$-edge-connected, different spanning trees may lead to intersection graphs with different matching numbers. We also show that there exist $2$-edge connected graphs for which the set of values of matching numbers of their intersection graphs contains arbitrarily large gaps.

Lower Bounds for the Average Genus of a CF-graph

CF-graphs form a class of multigraphs that contains all simple graphs. We prove a lower bound for the average genus of a CF-graph which is a linear function of its Betti number. A lower bound for average genus in terms of the maximum genus and some structure theorems for graphs with a given average genus are also provided.