A refinement of Kuratowski's theorem (Q800369)

A chord of a cycle C is an edge not in C but joining two vertices of C. This paper settles in the affirmative the following conjecture of Kelmans (Problem at the 6th Hungarian Colloquium on Combinatorics, Eger, 1981): If G is a 3-connected non-planar graph of order six or more, then G has a cycle with three pairwise crossing chords. This result is then used to establish a refinement of Kuratowski's theorem, for which a class \({\mathcal C}\) of graphs is defined by: (i) \(K_ 5\) and each planar 3-connected graph are in \({\mathcal C}\); (ii) if \(e_ 1=x_ 1y_ 1\) and \(e_ 2=x_ 2y_ 2\) are edges of disjoint graphs \(G_ 1\) and \(G_ 2\), respecively, in \({\mathcal C}\), then the graph obtained from \(G_ 1\cup G_ 2\) by identifying \(x_ 1\) with \(y_ 1\) and \(x_ 2\) with \(y_ 2\) and possibly deleting \(e_ 1\) and \(e_ 2\) is also in \({\mathcal C}\). Then the refinement is: Any 2-connected graph G satisfies precisely one of: (1) G is in \({\mathcal C}\); (2) G contains a cycle C with six vertices \(x_ 1\), \(x_ 2,...,x_ 6\) in that cyclic order such that, for each \(i=1,2,3\), either \(x_ ix_{i+3}\) is an edge of G or \(G-\{x_ i,x_{i+3}\}\) has a connected component \(H_ i\) not intersecting C.