On Upward Drawings of Trees on a Given Grid

Computing a minimum-area planar straight-line drawing of a graph is known to be NP-hard for planar graphs, even when restricted to outerplanar graphs. However, the complexity question is open for trees. Only a few hardness results are known for straight-line drawings of trees under various restrictions such as edge length or slope constraints. On the other hand, there exist polynomial-time algorithms for computing minimum-width (resp., minimum-height) upward drawings of trees, where the height (resp., width) is unbounded. In this paper we take a major step in understanding the complexity of the area minimization problem for strictly-upward drawings of trees, which is one of the most common styles for drawing rooted trees. We prove that given a rooted tree $T$ and a $W\times H$ grid, it is NP-hard to decide whether $T$ admits a strictly-upward (unordered) drawing in the given grid.Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2017

Proximity Drawings of High-Degree Trees

A drawing of a given (abstract) tree that is a minimum spanning tree of the vertex set is considered aesthetically pleasing. However, such a drawing can only exist if the tree has maximum degree at most 6. What can be said for trees of higher degree? We approach this question by supposing that a partition or covering of the tree by subtrees of bounded degree is given. Then we show that if the partition or covering satisfies some natural properties, then there is a drawing of the entire tree such that each of the given subtrees is drawn as a minimum spanning tree of its vertex set

Tree Drawings Revisited

We make progress on a number of open problems concerning the area requirement for drawing trees on a grid. We prove that 1) every tree of size n (with arbitrarily large degree) has a straight-line drawing with area n2^{O(sqrt{log log n log log log n})}, improving the longstanding O(n log n) bound; 2) every tree of size n (with arbitrarily large degree) has a straight-line upward drawing with area n sqrt{log n}(log log n)^{O(1)}, improving the longstanding O(n log n) bound; 3) every binary tree of size n has a straight-line orthogonal drawing with area n2^{O(log^*n)}, improving the previous O(n log log n) bound by Shin, Kim, and Chwa (1996) and Chan, Goodrich, Kosaraju, and Tamassia (1996); 4) every binary tree of size n has a straight-line order-preserving drawing with area n2^{O(log^*n)}, improving the previous O(n log log n) bound by Garg and Rusu (2003); 5) every binary tree of size n has a straight-line orthogonal order-preserving drawing with area n2^{O(sqrt{log n})}, improving the O(n^{3/2}) previous bound by Frati (2007)

How to fit a tree in a box

We study compact straight-line embeddings of trees. We show that perfect binary trees can be embedded optimally: a tree with n nodes can be drawn on a vn by vn grid. We also show that testing whether a given rooted binary tree has an upward embedding with a given combinatorial embedding in a given grid is NP-hard.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft