The excluded minors for embeddability into a compact surface (Q6999750)

The main aim of this paper is to provide the excluded minors characterising the class of countable graphs that embed into a compact surface, with no restriction on the genus. The main result of the paper is the following: A countable graph \(G\) embeds into a compact (orientable) surface if and only if it does not have one of the 8 graphs illustrated in the paper as a minor. Since none of these graphs embeds into a closed surface, orientable or not, this theorem remains valid if the word `orientable' is removed. One of the tools for the proof of this theorem is a result of independent interest, saying that a graph embeds into a compact surface if and only if it can be decomposed into finitely many planar subgraphs with finite pairwise intersections. An open question and a conjecture conclude the paper.