Face-simple minimal quadrangulations of surfaces

Abstract

For each surface besides the sphere, projective plane, and Klein bottle, we construct a face-simple minimal quadrangulation, that is, a simple quadrangulation on the fewest number of vertices possible, whose dual is also a simple graph. Our result answers a question of Liu, Ellingham, and Ye while providing a simpler proof of their main result. The inductive construction is based on an earlier idea for finding near-quadrangular embeddings of the complete graphs using the diamond sum operation.