Geometric Intersection Patterns and the Theory of Topological Graphs

The intersection graph of a set system S is a graph on the vertex set S, in which two vertices are connected by an edge if and only if the corresponding sets have nonempty intersection. It was shown by Tietze (1905) that every finite graph is the intersection graph of 3-dimensional convex polytopes. The analogous statement is false in any fixed dimension if the polytopes are allowed to have only a bounded number of faces or are replaced by simple geometric objects that can be described in terms of a bounded number of real parameters. Intersection graphs of various classes of geometric objects, even in the plane, have interesting structural and extremal properties. We survey problems and results on geometric intersection graphs and, more generally, intersection patterns. Many of the questions discussed were originally raised by Berge, Erdős, Grünbaum, Hadwiger, Turán, and others in the context of classical topology, graph theory, and combinatorics (related, e.g., to Helly’s theorem, Ramsey theory, perfect graphs). The rapid development of computational geometry and graph drawing algorithms in the last couple of decades gave further impetus to research in this field. A topological graph is a graph drawn in the plane so that its vertices are represented by points and its edges by possibly intersecting simple continuous curves connecting the corresponding point pairs. We give applications of the results concerning intersection patterns in the theory of topological graphs. Mathematics Subject Classification (2010). Primary 05C35; Secondary 05C62, 52C10.