Tangles and Degenerate Tangles

We study some variants of Conway’s thrackle conjecture. A tangle is a graph drawn in the plane such that its edges are represented by continuous arcs, and any two edges share precisely one point, which is either a common endpoint or an interior point at which the two edges are tangent to each other. These points of tangencies are assumed to be distinct. If we drop the last assumption, that is, more than two edges may touch one another at the same point, then the drawing is called a degenerate tangle. We settle a problem of Pach, Radoičić, and Tóth [7], by showing that every degenerate tangle has at most as many edges as vertices. We also give a complete characterization of tangles.