Graphs of scramble number two

Abstract

The scramble number of a graph provides a lower bound for gonality and an upper bound for treewidth, making it a graph invariant of interest. In this paper we study graphs of scramble number at most two, and give a classification of all such graphs with a finite list of forbidden topological minors. We then prove that there exists no finite list of forbidden topological minors to characterize graphs of any fixed scramble number greater than two.