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Main Authors: Blake, Heather Smith, Hodor, Jędrzej, Micek, Piotr, Seweryn, Michał T., Trotter, William T.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18603
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author Blake, Heather Smith
Hodor, Jędrzej
Micek, Piotr
Seweryn, Michał T.
Trotter, William T.
author_facet Blake, Heather Smith
Hodor, Jędrzej
Micek, Piotr
Seweryn, Michał T.
Trotter, William T.
contents The dimension of a partially ordered set $P$ (poset for short) is the least positive integer $d$ such that $P$ is isomorphic to a subposet of $\mathbb{R}^d$ with the natural product order. Dimension is arguably the most widely studied measure of complexity for posets, and standard examples in posets are the canonical structure forcing dimension to be large. In many ways, dimension for posets is analogous to chromatic number for graphs with standard examples in posets playing the role of cliques in graphs. However, planar graphs have chromatic number at most four, while posets with planar diagrams may have arbitrarily large dimension. The key feature of all known constructions of such posets is that large dimension is forced by a large standard example. The question of whether every poset of large dimension and with a planar cover graph contains a large standard example has been a critical challenge in posets theory since the early 1980s, with very little progress over the years. We answer the question in the affirmative. Namely, we show that every poset $P$ with a planar cover graph has dimension $\mathcal{O}(s^8)$, where $s$ is the maximum order of a standard example in $P$.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_18603
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Planarity and dimension I
Blake, Heather Smith
Hodor, Jędrzej
Micek, Piotr
Seweryn, Michał T.
Trotter, William T.
Combinatorics
The dimension of a partially ordered set $P$ (poset for short) is the least positive integer $d$ such that $P$ is isomorphic to a subposet of $\mathbb{R}^d$ with the natural product order. Dimension is arguably the most widely studied measure of complexity for posets, and standard examples in posets are the canonical structure forcing dimension to be large. In many ways, dimension for posets is analogous to chromatic number for graphs with standard examples in posets playing the role of cliques in graphs. However, planar graphs have chromatic number at most four, while posets with planar diagrams may have arbitrarily large dimension. The key feature of all known constructions of such posets is that large dimension is forced by a large standard example. The question of whether every poset of large dimension and with a planar cover graph contains a large standard example has been a critical challenge in posets theory since the early 1980s, with very little progress over the years. We answer the question in the affirmative. Namely, we show that every poset $P$ with a planar cover graph has dimension $\mathcal{O}(s^8)$, where $s$ is the maximum order of a standard example in $P$.
title Planarity and dimension I
topic Combinatorics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18603