Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

This talk focuses on Eulerian graphs whose arcs are directed and labelled in a group. Each circuit yields a word over the group, and we say that a circuit is non-zero if this word does not evaluate to 0. We give a precise min-max theorem for the following problem. Given a vertex $v$, what is the maximum number of non-zero circuits in a circuit decomposition where each circuit begins and ends at $v$? This is joint work with Jim Geelen and Paul Wollan. Our main motivation is a surprising connection with vertex-minors which is due to Bouchet and Kotzig.