Embedding a graph in the grid of a surface with the minimum number of bends is NP-hard

This paper is devoted to the study of graph embeddings in the grid of non-planar surfaces. We provide an adequate model for those embeddings and we study the complexity of minimizing the number of bends. In particular, we prove that testing whether a graph admits a rectilinear (without bends) embedding essentially equivalent to a given embedding, and that given a graph, testing if there exists a surface such that the graph admits a rectilinear embedding in that surface are NP-complete problems and hence the corresponding optimization problems are NP-hard