Spherical-Rectangular Drawings

Abstract

We extend the concept of rectangular drawing to drawings on a sphere using meridians and circles of latitude such that each face is bounded by at most two circles and at most two meridians. This is called spherical-rectangular drawing. Special cases include drawing on a cylinder, a cone, or a lattice of concentric circles on the plane. In this paper, we prove necessary and sufficient conditions for cubic planar graphs to have spherical-rectangular drawings, and show that one can find in linear time a spherical-rectangular drawing of a subcubic planar graph if it has one.