We study simplicial surfaces, which describe the incidence relations of triangulated surfaces.
By considering only the incidence between faces and edges, we can define a cubic graph associated to a simplicial surface, called the face graph. Several properties of simplicial surfaces can be transferred to properties of their face graphs, where e.g. 3-connectivity plays a particular role.
The more interesting and challenging direction is to investigate, for a given cubic graph $G$, whether there exists a simplicial surface which has $G$ as its face graph. We shall see in this talk that computing such a simplicial surface is equivalent to computing a cycle double cover of the graph. Moreover, we know from Whitney’s embedding theorem that 3-connected cubic planar graphs are uniquely embeddable on the sphere.
This embedding can be translated into a unique embedding of the graph on the simplicial sphere. In addition, 3-connected cubic planar graphs can also be embedded on simplicial surfaces of higher genus. We characterise the properties a face graph $G$ of a simplicial sphere must have to guarantee the existence of a simplicial surface with non-negative Euler characteristic which also has $G$ as its face graph. Furthermore, I show some computational results computed with GAP.