{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/frank-number-and-nowhere-zero-flows-on-graphs","title":"The Frank number and nowhere-zero flows on graphs","arxiv_id":"2305.02133","date":"2023-05-03","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jan Goedgebeur","Edita Máčajová","Jarne Renders"],"abstract":"An edge $e$ of a graph $G$ is called deletable for some orientation $o$ if the restriction of $o$ to $G-e$ is a strong orientation. Inspired by a problem of Frank, in 2021 H\\\"orsch and Szigeti proposed a new parameter for $3$-edge-connected graphs, called the Frank number, which refines $k$-edge-connectivity. The Frank number is defined as the minimum number of orientations of $G$ for which every edge of $G$ is deletable in at least one of them. They showed that every $3$-edge-connected graph has Frank number at most $7$ and that in case these graphs are also $3$-edge-colourable the parameter is at most $3$. Here we strengthen both results by showing that every $3$-edge-connected graph has Frank number at most $4$ and that every graph which is $3$-edge-connected and $3$-edge-colourable has Frank number $2$. The latter also confirms a conjecture by Bar\\'at and Bl\\'azsik. Furthermore, we prove two sufficient conditions for cubic graphs to have Frank number $2$ and use them in an algorithm to computationally show that the Petersen graph is the only cyclically $4$-edge-connected cubic graph up to $36$ vertices having Frank number greater than $2$.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.02133v4","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.02133v4.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"frank-number-and-nowhere-zero-flows-on-graphs","repo_url":"https://github.com/jarnerenders/frank-number","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}