Apex graphs with embeddings of face-width three (Q1377691)

An apex graph is a graph which has a vertex whose removal makes the resulting graph planar. The main result characterizes embeddings of apex graphs with face-width (representativity) three. The orientable genus of such embeddings can be arbitrarily high. The paper contains a short proof of a theorem of Robertson, Seymour and Thomas stating that any embedding of an apex graph in a nonorientable surface has face-width at most two.