The thickness of a graph $G$ is the minimum number of planar subgraphs whose union is $G$. A $t$-minimal graph is a graph of thickness $t$ that contains no proper subgraph of thickness $t$. In this paper, upper and lower bounds are obtained for the thickness, $t\left( G\,\square \,H \right)$, of the Cartesian product of two graphs $G$ and $H$, in terms of the thickness $t\left( G \right)$ and $t\left( H \right)$. Furthermore, the thickness of the Cartesian product of two planar graphs and of a $t$-minimal graph and a planar graph are determined. By using a new planar decomposition of the complete bipartite graph ${{K}_{4k,\,4k}}$, the thickness of the Cartesian product of two complete bipartite graphs ${{K}_{n,n}}$ and ${{K}_{n,n}}$ is also given for $n\,\ne \,4k\,+\,1$.

For a given list assignment $L\,=\,\{L\left( v \right)\,:\,v\,\in \,V\left( G \right)\}$, a graph $G\,=\,\left( V,\,E \right)$ is $L$-colorable if there exists a proper coloring $c$ of $G$ such that $c\left( v \right)\,\in \,L\left( v \right)$ for all $v\,\in \,V$. If $G$ is $L$-colorable for every list assignment $L$ having $\left| L\left( v \right) \right|\,\ge \,k$ for all $v\,\in \,V$, then $G$ is said to be $k$-choosable. Montassier (Inform. Process. Lett. 99 (2006) 68-71) conjectured that every planar graph without cycles of length 4, 5, 6, is 3-choosable. In this paper, we prove that every planar graph without 5-, 6- and 10-cycles, and without two triangles at distance less than 3 is 3-choosable.

Let $\def \xmlpi #1{}\def \mathsfbi #1{\boldsymbol {\mathsf {#1}}}\let \le =\leqslant \let \leq =\leqslant \let \ge =\geqslant \let \geq =\geqslant \def \Pr {\mathit {Pr}}\def \Fr {\mathit {Fr}}\def \Rey {\mathit {Re}}R$ be a commutative ring, $I(R)$ be the set of all ideals of $R$ and $S$ be a subset of $I^*(R)=I(R)\setminus \{0\}$. We define a Cayley sum digraph of ideals of $R$, denoted by $\overrightarrow{\mathrm{Cay}}^+ (I(R),S)$, as a directed graph whose vertex set is the set $I(R)$ and, for every two distinct vertices $I$ and $J$, there is an arc from $I$ to $J$, denoted by $I\longrightarrow J$, whenever $I+K=J$, for some ideal $K $ in $S$. Also, the Cayley sum graph $ \mathrm{Cay}^+ (I(R), S)$ is an undirected graph whose vertex set is the set $I(R)$ and two distinct vertices $I$ and $J$ are adjacent whenever $I+K=J$ or $J+K=I$, for some ideal $K $ in $ S$. In this paper, we study some basic properties of the graphs $\overrightarrow{\mathrm{Cay}}^+ (I(R),S)$ and $ \mathrm{Cay}^+ (I(R), S)$ such as connectivity, girth and clique number. Moreover, we investigate the planarity, outerplanarity and ring graph of $ \mathrm{Cay}^+ (I(R), S)$ and also we provide some characterization for rings $R$ whose Cayley sum graphs have genus one.

We pose some graph theoretic conjectures about duality and the diameter of maximal trees in planar graphs, and we give innovations in the following two topics in geometric group theory, where the conjectures have applications.

Central extensions. We describe an electrostatic model concerning how van Kampen diagrams change when one takes a central extension of a group. Modulo the conjectures, this leads to a new proof that finitely generated class $c$ nilpotent groups admit degree $c+1$ polynomial isoperimetric functions.

Filling functions. We collate and extend results about interrelationships between filling functions for finite presentations of groups. We use the electrostatic model in proving that the gallery length filling function, which measures the diameter of the duals of diagrams, is qualitatively the same as a filling function DlogA, concerning the sum of the diameter with the logarithm of the area of a diagram. We show that the conjectures imply that the space-complexity filling function filling length essentially equates to gallery length. We give linear upper bounds on these functions for a number of classes of groups including fundamental groups of compact geometrizable 3-manifolds, certain graphs of groups, and almost convex groups. Also we define restricted filling functions which concern diagrams with uniformly bounded vertex valence, and we show that, assuming the conjectures, they reduce to just two filling functions—the analogues of non-deterministic space and time.

A planar graph contains faces which can be classified into types depending on the number of edges on the face boundaries. Under various natural rules for randomly dividing faces by the addition of new edges, we investigate the limiting distribution of face type as the number of divisions increases.