Tree-width of hypergraphs and surface duality

Abstract

In Graph Minor III, Robertson and Seymour conjecture that the tree-width of a planar graph and that of its dual differ by at most one. We prove that given a hypergraph H on a surface of Euler genus k, the tree-width of H^* is at most the maximum of tw(H) + 1 + k and the maximum size of a hyperedge of H^*.