Geometric Realizations of Dichotomous Ordinal Graphs

Abstract

A dichotomous ordinal graph consists of an undirected graph with a partition of the edges into short and long edges. A geometric realization of a dichotomous ordinal graph G in a metric space X is a drawing of G in X in which every long edge is strictly longer than every short edge. We call a graph G pandichotomous in X if G admits a geometric realization in X for every partition of its edge set into short and long edges. 
We exhibit a very close relationship between the degeneracy of a graph G and its pandichotomic Euclidean or spherical dimension, that is, the smallest dimension k such that G is pandichotomous in ℝ^k or the sphere 𝒮^k, respectively. First, every d-degenerate graph is pandichotomous in ℝ^d and 𝒮^{d-1} and these bounds are tight for the sphere and for ℝ² and almost tight for ℝ^d, for d ≥ 3. Second, every n-vertex graph that is pandichotomous in ℝ^k has at most μ kn edges, for some absolute constant μ < 7.23. This shows that the pandichotomic Euclidean dimension of any graph is linearly tied to its degeneracy and in the special case k ∈ {1,2} resolves open problems posed by Alam, Kobourov, Pupyrev, and Toeniskoetter. 
Further, we characterize which complete bipartite graphs are pandichotomous in ℝ²: These are exactly the K_{m,n} with m ≤ 3 or m = 4 and n ≤ 6. For general bipartite graphs, we can guarantee realizations in ℝ² if the short or the long subgraph is constrained: namely if the short subgraph is outerplanar or a subgraph of a rectangular grid, or if the long subgraph forms a caterpillar.