Alphabeta Math
LemmaStatement: Literature-sourcedProof: AI-adaptedprecheck passaudited 2026-08-11
How statement and proof provenance work

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).

Proof

technique · direct
1.1

A sufficiently small rectangle about any interior point of e meets the drawing only in a straight subsegment of e. Its two open half-rectangles lie in faces. Sliding overlapping rectangles along the compact edge interior shows that each local side remains in one face until an endpoint is reached; hence frontier membership propagates along the entire edge.

given
2.1

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.

step 1.1L1
3.1

If e lies on no cycle, [L2] makes it a bridge. Delete its interior. The two local sides can be joined by a small detour around either endpoint through the component complement, because no second endpoint path closes a polygon. They therefore lie in one face, and a boundary traversal encounters e once in each direction.

step 1.1L2∎

Depends on

Used by

Dependency tree · two levels

16 results within two dependency steps of this one, each drawn at its shortest distance from it. An arrow runs from a result to what uses it, so the chart reads left to right and ends at this result, which carries a heavier outline. Every node is a link to that result. Click elsewhere on the chart to enlarge it.

Sources