Checkerboard embeddings of *-graphs into nonorientable surfaces

This paper considers *-graphs in which all vertices have degree 4 or 6, and studies the question of calculating the genus of nonorientable surfaces into which such graphs may be embedded. In a previous paper by the authors, the problem of calculating whether a given *-graph in which all vertices have degree 4 or 6 admits a Z2-homologically trivial embedding into a given orientable surface was shown to be equivalent to a problem on matrices. Here we extend those results to nonorientable surfaces. The embeddability condition that we obtain yields quadratic-time algorithms to determine whether a *-graph with all vertices of degree 4 or 6 admits a Z2-homologically trivial embedding into the projective plane or into the Klein bottle.