Joanna A. Ellis-Monaghan - Böcker

The Tutte Polynomial touches on nearly every area of combinatorics as well as many other fields, including statistical mechanics, coding theory, and DNA sequencing. It is one of the most studied graph polynomials.Handbook of the Tutte Polynomial and Related Topics is the first handbook published on the Tutte Polynomial. It consists of thirty-four chapters written by experts in the field, which collectively offer a concise overview of the polynomial’s many properties and applications. Each chapter covers a different aspect of the Tutte polynomial and contains the central results and references for its topic. The chapters are organized into six parts. Part I describes the fundamental properties of the Tutte polynomial, providing an overview of the Tutte polynomial and the necessary background for the rest of the handbook. Part II is concerned with questions of computation, complexity, and approximation for the Tutte polynomial; Part III covers a selection of related graph polynomials; Part IV discusses a range of applications of the Tutte polynomial to mathematics, physics, and biology; Part V includes various extensions and generalizations of the Tutte polynomial; and Part VI provides a history of the development of the Tutte polynomial.Features Written in an accessible style for non-experts, yet extensive enough for experts Serves as a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the theory of graph polynomials for researchers in mathematics, physics, and computer science Provides an extensive reference volume for the evaluations, theorems, and properties of the Tutte polynomial and related graph, matroid, and knot invariants Offers broad coverage, touching on the wide range of applications of the Tutte polynomial and its various specializations

Graphs on Surfaces: Dualities, Polynomials, and Knots offers an accessible and comprehensive treatment of recent developments on generalized duals of graphs on surfaces, and their applications. The authors  illustrate the interdependency between duality, medial graphs and knots; how this interdependency is reflected in algebraic invariants of graphs and knots; and how it can be exploited to solve problems in graph and knot theory. Taking  a constructive approach, the authors emphasize how generalized duals and related ideas arise by localizing classical constructions, such as geometric duals and Tait graphs, and then removing artificial restrictions in these constructions to obtain full extensions of them to embedded graphs. The authors demonstrate the benefits of these generalizations to embedded graphs in chapters describing their applications to graph polynomials and knots.  Graphs on Surfaces: Dualities, Polynomials, and Knots  also provides a self-contained introduction to graphs on surfaces, generalized duals, topological graph polynomials, and knot polynomials that is accessible both to graph theorists and to knot theorists.  Directed at those with some familiarity with basic graph theory and knot theory, this book is appropriate for graduate students and researchers in either area. Because the area is advancing so rapidly, the authors give a comprehensive overview of the topic and include a robust bibliography, aiming to provide the reader with the necessary foundations to stay abreast of the field. The reader will come away from the text convinced of advantages of considering these higher genus analogues of constructions of plane and abstract graphs, and with a good understanding of how they arise.