of edges incident to the same vertex, where "clockwise" is defined by the orientation of the surface. If a multigraph is embedded on an orientable but not oriented surface, it generally corresponds to two rotation systems, one for each of the two orientations of the surface. These two rotation systems have the same involution θ, but the permutation σ for one rotation system is the inverse of the corresponding permutation for the other rotation system. Recovering the embedding from the rotation system To recover a multigraph from a rotation system, we form a vertex for each orbit of σ, and an edge for each orbit of θ. A vertex is incident with an edge if these two orbits have a nonempty intersection. Thus, the number of incidences per vertex is the size of the orbit, and the number of incidences per edge is exactly two. If a rotation system is derived from a 2-cell embedding of a connected multigraph G, the graph derived from the rotation system is isomorphic to G. To embed the graph derived from a rotation system onto a surface, form a disk for each orbit of σθ, and glue two disks together along an edge e whenever the two darts corresponding to e belong to the two orbits corresponding to these disks. The result is a 2-cell embedding of the derived multigraph, the two-cells of which are the disks corresponding to the orbits of σθ. The surface of this embedding can be oriented in such a way that the clockwise ordering of the edges around each vertex is the same as the clockwise ordering given by σ. Characterizing the surface of the embedding According to the Euler formula we can deduce the genus g of the closed orientable surface defined by the rotation system (that is, the surface on which the underlying multigraph is 2-cell embedded). Notice that , and . We find that where denotes the set of the orbits of permutation . See also Combinatorial map Notes References . Topological graph theory