Triangle Contact Representations and Duality

A contact representation by triangles of a graph is a set of triangles in the plane such that two triangles intersect on at most one point, each triangle represents a vertex of the graph and two triangles intersects if and only if their corresponding vertices are adjacent. de Fraysseix, Ossona de Mendez and Rosenstiehl proved that every planar graph admits a contact representation by triangles. We strengthen this in terms of a simultaneous contact representation by triangles of a planar map and of its dual.

A primal-dual contact representation by triangles of a planar map is a contact representation by triangles of the primal and a contact representation by triangles of the dual such that for every edge

uv

, bordering faces

f

and

g

, the intersection between the triangles corresponding to

u

and

v

is the same point as the intersection between the triangles corresponding to

f

and

g

. We prove that every 3-connected planar map admits a primal-dual contact representation by triangles. Moreover, the interiors of the triangles form a tiling of the triangle corresponding to the outer face and each contact point is a node of exactly three triangles. Then we show that these representations are in one-to-one correspondence with generalized Schnyder woods defined by Felsner for 3-connected planar maps.