Labeeb Mohammed

MATH 5355

Dec/11/2014

Is it true that every 3-connected, 3-regular, planar bipartite

graph is Hamiltonian? (Barnette's conjecture)

Background (History of The Problem): Barnette's conjecture is an unsolved problem in graph

theory its history starts with the Scottish mathematical physicist Peter Guthrie Tait (1884)
conjectured that every cubic polyhedral graph is Hamiltonian. In some books it is also known
as Tait's conjecture. William Thomas Tutte disproved it in 1946 by constructing
a counterexample ( see Fig. 1) of a graph with 46 vertices. Tutte himself conjectured that every

Fig 1

cubic 3-connected bipartite graph is Hamiltonian, but this was shown to be false. David W.
Barnette in 1969 proposed a weakened combination of Tait's and Tutte's conjectures, stating that
every bipartite cubic polyhedron is Hamiltonian, or, equivalently, that every counterexample to
Tait's conjecture is non-bipartite.
Description:
Barnettes conjecture states that every bipartite polyhedral graph with three edges per vertex has
a Hamiltonian cycle. It has been known that this conjecture is not true if you remove the
"bipartite" condition, but the smallest known such graph which is not Hamiltonian has 38
vertices, as shown in Fig 2. Which is a planar graph.
A planar graph is an undirected
graph that lies in a plane without any
of its edges crossings. A planar
graph is called polyhedral if and only
if it is 3-vertex-connected. A graph is
bipartite if its vertices can be colored
with two different colors such that
each edge has one endpoint of each
color. A graph is cubic (or 3-regular)
Fig 2
if each vertex is the endpoint of
exactly three edges. And, a graph is
Hamiltonian if there exists a cycle that passes exactly once through each of its vertices.
Barnette's conjecture states that every cubic bipartite polyhedral graph is Hamiltonian.

Labeeb Mohammed

MATH 5355

Dec/11/2014

By Steinitz's theorem, a planar graph represents the edges and vertices of a convex polyhedron if
and only if it is polyhedral. And, a planar graph is bipartite if and only if, in a planar embedding
of the graph, all face cycles have even length. Therefore, Barnette's conjecture may be stated in
an equivalent form.
Attempted solutions: Although Barrette conjecture has not been solved completely, but there
are some researchers that have attempted it by using computational experiment where the
conjecture hold as long as the graph has less than 86 vertices. If Barrette conjecture is false then
then we can show that by using NP-complete to test whether a bipartite cubic polyhedron is
Hamiltonian. And if the graph is planar, bipartite, and cubic but only 2-connectd, then it maybe
non-Hamiltonian, and it is NP-complete to check these graphs if they are Hamiltonian.
Another attempted was done by using a super computer, and they ran
proof by exhaustion and the found out that only graph on nine or
fewer vertices satisfying Barnette's conditions is the cubical graph
(see Fig. 3), which is Hamiltonian. The structure of the truncated
octahedron, great rhombicuboctahedron, and great
rhombicosidodecahedron also satisfy the conditions and, since they
are Archimedean solids, are indeed Hamiltonian. Holton et al. (1985)
proved that all graphs having fewer than 66 vertices satisfy the
conjecture, but the general conjecture remains open.
Fig 3
Two researchers Tomas Feder and Carlos Cubi wrote a research
together trying to solve Barnette conjecture. They approached by
using the NP-complete method in addition to other methods. At the end of their paper they end
up with a theorem at the end of their research and they restrict the conjecture where it will work.
Their theorem says Theorem 5: Suppose there exists a 3-connected cubic planar bipartite graph
G0 that is not Hamiltonian. Then the question of whether a 3-connected cubic planar bipartite
graph G has a Hamiltonian cycle is NP-complete. So from previously they were able to prove
the conjecture with the restriction.
References:

1.
2.
3.
4.

http://dimacs.rutgers.edu/~hochberg/undopen/graphtheory/graphtheory.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnette%27s_conjecture
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/CubicalGraph.html
Aldred, R. E. L.; Bau, S.; Holton, D. A.; McKay, Brendan D. (2000), "Nonhamiltonian 3connected cubic planar graphs", SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics
5. Barnette, David W. (1969), "Conjecture 5", in Tutte, W. T., Recent Progress in
Combinatorics: Proceedings of the Third Waterloo Conference on Combinatorics, May
1968, New York: Academic Press
6. W.T. Tutte. A theorem on planar graphs. Transactions of the American Mathematical
Society, 82, no. 1:99116, 1956
7. http://theory.stanford.edu/~tomas/barnew.pdf

Labeeb Mohammed

MATH 5355

Dec/11/2014