Circular flows of nearly Eulerian graphs and vertex‐splitting

The odd edge connectivity of a graph G, denoted by λ_o(G), is the size of a smallest odd edge cut of the graph. Let S be any given surface and ? be a positive real number. We proved that there is a function f_S(?) (depends on the surface S and lim_?→0 f_S(?)=∞) such that any graph G embedded in S with the odd‐edge connectivity at least f_S(?) admits a nowhere‐zero circular (2+?)‐flow. Another major result of the work is a new vertex splitting lemma which maintains the old edge connectivity and graph embedding. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Graph Theory 40: 147–161, 2002