Importance: Medium ✭✭
 Author(s): de Fraysseix, Hubert Ossona de Mendez, Patrice Rosenstiehl, Pierre
 Subject: Graph Theory » Topological Graph Theory » » Drawings
 Keywords: Hypergraphs
 Posted by: taxipom on: September 26th, 2007

\begin{conjecture} Any linear hypergraph with incidence poset of dimension at most 3 is the intersection hypergraph of a family of triangles and segments in the plane. \end{conjecture}

A hypergraph is linear if any two edges may share at most one vertex. The incidence poset of a hypergraph is the vertex-edge inclusion poset. The dimension of a poset $P$ is the minimum number of linear extentions of $P$, whose intersection is $P$ [DM].

Schnyder proved that the incidence poset of a graph $G$ has dimension at most $3$ if and only if $G$ is planar [S89]. Fraysseix, Rosenstiehl and Ossona de Mendez proved that every planar graph has a representation by contacts of triangles [FOR94] and Scheinerman conjectured that every planar graph has a representation by intersection of segments [S84] (claimed to be proved by Gonçalves et al.).

A hypergraph is planar if its vertex-edge incidence graph is planar [W]. Fraysseix, Rosenstiehl and Ossona de Mendez proved that every planar linear hypergraph has a representation by contacts of triangles [FOR07] and it has been conjectured that they have a representation by intersection of straight line segments [FO07] (cf \OPrefnum[Straight line representation of planar linear hypergraphs]{554}).

Although the incidence poset of a simple planar hypergraph has dimension at most $3$ (what follows from [BT]), the converse is false: The linear hypergraph with vertices $1,\dots,5$ and edge set $\{\{1,2\},\{2,3\},\{3,4\},\{1,4\},\{1,3,5\},\{2,4,5\}\}$ has incidence dimension $3$ but is not planar (its vertex-edge incidence graph is a subdivision of $K_{3,3}$). It follows from [O] that the vertices of simple hypergraphs with incidence posets of dimensions $d$ can be represented by convex sets of the Euclidean space of dimension $d-1$, in such a way that the edges of the hypergraph are exactly the maximal subsets of vertices, such that the corresponding subset of convexes has a non-empty intersection.

## Bibliography

[BT] G.~Brightwell and W.T. Trotter, The order dimension of planar maps, SIAM journal on Discrete Mathematics 10 (1997), no.~4, 515--528.

[DM] B.~Dushnik and E.W. Miller, Partially ordered sets, Amer. J. Math. 63 (1941), 600--610.

[FO07] Hubert de Fraysseix, Patrice Ossona de Mendez: Stretching of Jordan arc contact systems, Discrete Applied Mathematics 155 (2007), no. 9, 1079--1095.

[FOR94] H.~de Fraysseix, P.~Ossona~de Mendez, and P.~Rosenstiehl, On triangle contact graphs, Combinatorics, Probability and Computing 3 (1994), 233--246.

*[FOR07] H.~de Fraysseix, P.~Ossona~de Mendez, and P.~Rosenstiehl, Representation of Planar Hypergraphs by Contacts of Triangles, Proc. of Graph Drawing '07, to appear.

[O] P.~Ossona~de Mendez, Realization of posets, Journal of Graph Algorithms and Applications 6 (2002), no.~1, 149--153.

[S84] E.R. Scheinerman, Intersection classes and multiple intersection parameters of graphs, Ph.D. thesis, Princeton University, 1984.

[S89] W.~Schnyder, Planar graphs and poset dimension, Order 5 (1989), 323--343.

[W] T.R.S. Walsh, Hypermaps versus bipartite maps, J. Combinatorial Theory 18(B) (1975), 155--163.

% Example: %*[B] Claude Berge, Farbung von Graphen, deren samtliche bzw. deren ungerade Kreise starr sind, Wiss. Z. Martin-Luther-Univ. Halle-Wittenberg Math.-Natur. Reihe 10 (1961), 114. % %[CRS] Maria Chudnovsky, Neil Robertson, Paul Seymour, Robin Thomas: \arxiv[The strong perfect graph theorem]{math.CO/0212070}, % Ann. of Math. (2) 164 (2006), no. 1, 51--229. \MRhref{MR2233847} % % (Put an empty line between individual entries)

* indicates original appearance(s) of problem.