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

Apollonian circle packings: Dynamics and Number theory

We give an overview of various counting problems for Apollonian circle packings, which turn out to be related to problems in dynamics and number theory for thin groups. This survey article is an expanded version of my lecture notes prepared for the 13th Takagi lectures given at RIMS, Kyoto in the fall of 2013.Comment: To appear in Japanese Journal of Mat