Degree-regular triangulations of torus and Klein bottle (Q2572424)

This paper treats degree-regular triangulations of surfaces of Euler characteristic~\(0\), i.e., triangulations in which the same number of edges is incident to each vertex. After briefly reviewing some known results on triangulations of surfaces of non-vanishing Euler characteristic, the authors prove the following results: {\parindent=5mm \begin{itemize}\item[{\(\bullet\)}]Any degree-regular triangulation of the torus is weakly regular, i.e., it has a vertex-transitive automorphism group, and for each \(n\geq18\) there exist at least three distinct weakly regular triangulations on \(n\)~vertices. \item[{\(\bullet\)}]There exists an \(n\)-vertex degree-regular triangulation of the Klein bottle if and only if \(n\)~is a composite number and \(n\geq9\). For each \(m\geq2\) there exists a weakly regular triangulation of the Klein bottle on \(4m+2\) vertices. \item[{\(\bullet\)}]Finally, the authors classify -- without using a computer -- all non-isomorphic degree-regular triangulations of surfaces of Euler characteristic~\(0\) on \(n=12\),~\(13\), \(14\), \(15\), \(17\) and \(19\)~vertices, and find that \(17\)~of these triangulate the torus, and \(7\)~the Klein bottle. \end{itemize}} The paper proceeds by first classifying the members of a certain family \(T_{n,m,k}\) of triangulations up to isomorphism, and then proving, with a moderate number of case distinctions, the first two assertions. The bulk of the paper is taken up by the proof of the classification of the degree-regular triangulations on~\(12\), \(14\), and \(15\)~vertices; here, the case distinction tree reaches depth~\(4\) and has more than \(60\)~leaves (!). [The erratum is authored by the second author.]