Alphabeta Math
LemmaStatement: Literature-sourcedProof: AI-adaptedverified 2026-09-26 (gpt-6-sol)
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The first chip identifies the source of the statement or construction; the second identifies the source of its local proof or verification.

  • Literature-sourced: the exact statement appears in a cited source; only wording and notation differ.
  • AI-adapted: a semantically identical restatement of literature-sourced material, modulo indexing, notation, and boundary cases adopted by the library.
  • AI-generated: a genuinely novel statement formulated by AI, with no source for the claim itself.

These labels describe origin, not correctness: citations and verification chips remain separate evidence.

Face frontiers are unions of whole edges; a cycle edge borders two faces and a bridge borders one

Statement

In a plane graph (Plane embeddings of finite simple graphs, their faces, facial boundary walks and lengths (counting a bridge twice), and planar graphs), if the relative interior of an edge meets the frontier of a face, then the whole edge lies in that frontier. An edge on a cycle is incident with two distinct faces, one on each local side. A bridge is incident with one face on both local sides and is therefore traversed twice in that face's boundary walk. Edge deletion is as in Vertex and edge deletion, edge contraction, graph minors, subdivisions and topological minors, and the bridge cases use the arc-complement fact The complement of a polygonal arc in R2 is polygonally connected.

Facts & Assumptions

Given: A plane graph G and an edge e.

[L1]
[L2]

An edge is a bridge if and only if it lies on no cycle (An edge of a finite graph is a bridge if and only if it lies on no cycle).

[F1]

If X1,X2 are disjoint finite unions of plane points and polygonal arcs, and a polygonal arc P joins one point of each with its interior inside a region O of R2∖(X1∪X2), then O∖P remains a single region of R2∖(X1∪P∪X2) (Diestel, Graph Theory, Lemma 4.1.3, cited above).

Proof

technique · direct
1.1given

At an interior point of a straight segment of the polygonal arc e, a sufficiently small disk meets the drawing only in that segment; its two open sides lie in faces. At each of the finitely many bends, a small disk meets the drawing only in the two adjacent subsegments of e, and its two complementary local sides join the corresponding sides of those segments. Overlapping these finitely many local disks along e shows that each side stays in the same face throughout the edge interior. Every neighbourhood of an endpoint meets the edge interior, so that endpoint also lies in the frontier of each incident face. Hence any face frontier meeting the edge interior contains the whole edge.

2.1step 1.1L1

If e lies on a cycle C, [L1] gives two regions of the polygonal image of C. The two local sides of e lie in different such regions and cannot be joined in the complement of the full drawing, so they belong to two distinct faces of G.

3.1step 1.1L2F1∎

If e lies on no cycle, [L2] makes it a bridge. Partition the components of the deleted-edge drawing into two disjoint finite unions of points and arcs X1,X2, with the endpoints of e in different parts. The two local sides lie in one face f of that drawing, since a small rectangle across an interior point of e joins them there. Apply [F1] to X1,X2 and e: f∖e is one face of the original drawing. Thus the two local sides border the same face; its boundary walk encounters e once on each side.

Depends on

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Sources