The Galois Complexity of Graph Drawing: Why Numerical Solutions are Ubiquitous for Force-Directed, Spectral, and Circle Packing Drawings

Many well-known graph drawing techniques, including force directed drawings, spectral graph layouts, multidimensional scaling, and circle packings, have algebraic formulations. However, practical methods for producing such drawings ubiquitously use iterative numerical approximations rather than constructing and then solving algebraic expressions representing their exact solutions. To explain this phenomenon, we use Galois theory to show that many variants of these problems have solutions that cannot be expressed by nested radicals or nested roots of low-degree polynomials. Hence, such solutions cannot be computed exactly even in extended computational models that include such operations.Comment: Graph Drawing 201

Outerplanar graph drawings with few slopes

We consider straight-line outerplanar drawings of outerplanar graphs in which a small number of distinct edge slopes are used, that is, the segments representing edges are parallel to a small number of directions. We prove that $\Delta-1$ edge slopes suffice for every outerplanar graph with maximum degree $\Delta\ge 4$. This improves on the previous bound of $O(\Delta^5)$, which was shown for planar partial 3-trees, a superclass of outerplanar graphs. The bound is tight: for every $\Delta\ge 4$ there is an outerplanar graph with maximum degree $\Delta$ that requires at least $\Delta-1$ distinct edge slopes in an outerplanar straight-line drawing.Comment: Major revision of the whole pape