Partitioning a Planar Graph into two Triangle-Forests

Abstract

We show that the vertices of every planar graph can be partitioned into two sets, each inducing a so-called triangle-forest, i.e., a graph with no cycles of length more than three. We further discuss extensions to locally planar graphs. After finishing the paper we noticed that our main result was already proved much earlier by Carsten Thomassen [Decomposing a Planar Graph into Degenerate Graphs, JCTB 1995].