The Crossing Number of Seq-Shellable Drawings of Complete Graphs

The Harary-Hill conjecture states that for every n > 0 the complete graph on n vertices Kn, the minimum number of crossings over all its possible drawings equals H(n) := 1 4 ⌊n 2 ⌋⌊n− 1 2 ⌋⌊n− 2 2 ⌋⌊n− 3 2 ⌋ . So far, the lower bound of the conjecture could only be verified for arbitrary drawings of Kn with n ≤ 12. In recent years, progress has been made in verifying the conjecture for certain classes of drawings, for example 2-page-book, x-monotone, x-bounded, shellable and bishellable drawings. Up to now, the class of bishellable drawings was the broadest class for which the Harary-Hill conjecture has been verified, as it contains all beforehand mentioned classes. In this work, we introduce the class of seq-shellable drawings and verify the Harary-Hill conjecture for this new class. We show that bishellability implies seq-shellability and exhibit a non-bishellable but seq-shellable drawing of K11, therefore the class of seq-shellable drawings strictly contains the class of bishellable drawings.