Graphs, ribbon graphs, and polynomials

Abstract

AbstractIn this chapter we present some notions of graph theory that will be useful in the rest of the book. It is worth emphasizing that graph theorists and theoretical physicists adopt, unfortunately, different terminologies. We present here both terminologies, such that a sort of dictionary between these two communities can be established. We then extend the notion of graph to that of maps (or of ribbon graphs). Moreover, graph polynomials encoding these structures (the Tutte polynomial for graphs and the Bollobás–Riordan polynomial for ribbon graphs) are presented.