3-trees with Few Vertices of Degree 3 in Circuit Graphs

A circuit graph(G,C) is a 2-connected plane graph G with an outer cycle C such that from each inner vertex v, there are three disjoint paths to C. In this paper, we shall show that a circuit graph with n vertices has a 3-tree (i.e., a spanning tree with maximum degree at most 3) with at most n-73 vertices of degree 3. Our estimation for the number of vertices of degree 3 is sharp. Using this result, we prove that a 3-connected graph with n vertices on a surface F"@g with Euler characteristic @g>=0 has a 3-tree with at most n3+c"@g vertices of degree 3, where c"@g is a constant depending only on F"@g.