In mathematics, a dessin d'enfant is a type of graph embedding used to study Riemann surfaces and to provide combinatorial invariants for the action of the absolute Galois group of the rational numbers. The name of these embeddings is French for a "child's drawing"; its plural is either dessins d'enfant, "child's drawings", or dessins d'enfants, "children's drawings".
A dessin d'enfant is a graph, with its vertices colored alternately black and white, embedded in an oriented surface that, in many cases, is simply a plane. For the coloring to exist, the graph must be bipartite. The faces of the embedding are required to be topological disks. The surface and the embedding may be described combinatorially using a rotation system, a cyclic order of the edges surrounding each vertex of the graph that describes the order in which the edges would be crossed by a path that travels clockwise on the surface in a small loop around the vertex.
Any dessin can provide the surface it is embedded in with a structure as a Riemann surface. It is natural to ask which Riemann surfaces arise in this way. The answer is provided by Belyi's theorem, which states that the Riemann surfaces that can be described by dessins are precisely those that can be defined as algebraic curves over the field of algebraic numbers. The absolute Galois group transforms these particular curves into each other, and thereby also transforms the underlying dessins.
For a more detailed treatment of this subject, see Schneps (1994) or Lando & Zvonkin (2004).