2018/12/11 by Biedl, Therese, Kindermann, Philipp · 1 citation
#Combinatorics (math.CO) #Data Structures and Algorithms (cs.DS) #Discrete Mathematics (cs.DM) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Mathematics
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1812.04543
It is well-known that every planar graph has a Tutte path, i.e., a path P such that any component of G-P has at most three attachment points on P. However, it was only recently shown that such Tutte paths can be found in polynomial time. In this paper, we give a new proof that 3-connected planar graphs have Tutte paths, which leads to a linear-time algorithm to find Tutte paths. Furthermore, our Tutte path has special properties: it visits all exterior vertices, all components of G-P have exactly three attachment points, and we can assign distinct representatives to them that are interior vertices. Finally, our running time bound is slightly stronger; we can bound it in terms of the degrees of the faces that are incident to P. This allows us to find some applications of Tutte paths (such as binary spanning trees and 2-walks) in linear time as well.