Removing even crossings

Abstract

An edge in a drawing of a graph is called even if it intersects every other edge of the graph an even number of times. Pach and Tóth proved that a graph can always be redrawn so that its even edges are not involved in any intersections. We give a new and significantly simpler proof of the stronger statement that the redrawing can be done in such a way that no new odd intersections are introduced. We include two applications of this strengthened result: an easy proof of a theorem of Hanani and Tutte (the only proof we know of not to use Kuratowski's theorem), and the new result that the odd crossing number of a graph equals the crossing number of the graph for values of at most 3. The paper begins with a disarmingly simple proof of a weak (but standard) version of the theorem by Hanani and Tutte.