Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

A map (respectively, a unicellular map) on a genus g surface Sg is the Homeo+(Sg)-orbit of a graph G embedded on Sg such that Sg-G is a collection of finitely many disks (respectively, a single disk). The study of maps was initiated by W. Tutte, who was interested in counting the number of planar maps. However, we will consider maps from a more graph theoretic perspective in this talk. We will introduce a topological operation called surgery, which turns one unicellular map into another. Then, we will address natural questions (such as connectedness and diameter) about surgery graphs on unicellular maps, which are graphs whose vertices are unicellular maps and where two vertices share an edge if they are related by a single surgery. We will see that these problems translate to a well-known combinatorial problem: the card shuffling problem.