Abstract

Twenty years ago, Ajtai et al. and, independently, Leighton discovered that the crossing number of any graph with v vertices and e> 4v edges is at least ce3 /v2, where c> 0 is an absolute constant. This result, known as the “Crossing Lemma, ” has found many important applications in discrete and computational geometry. It is tight up to a multiplicative constant. Here we improve the best known value of the constant by showing that the result holds with c> 1024/31827> 0.032. The proof has two new ingredients, interesting in their own right. We show that (1) if a graph can be drawn in the plane so that every edge crosses at most three others, then its number of edges cannot exceed 5.5(v − 2); and (2) the crossing number of any graph is at least 7 25 e − (v − 2). Both bounds are tight upt o

Citations