Polyhedra, Complexes, Nets and Symmetry

Skeletal polyhedra and polygonal complexes in ordinary Euclidean 3-space are finite or infinite 3-periodic structures with interesting geometric, combinatorial, and algebraic properties. They can be viewed as finite or infinite 3-periodic graphs (nets) equipped with additional structure imposed by the faces, allowed to be skew, zig-zag, or helical. A polyhedron or complex is "regular" if its geometric symmetry group is transitive on the flags (incident vertex-edge-face triples). There are 48 regular polyhedra (18 finite polyhedra and 30 infinite apeirohedra), as well as 25 regular polygonal complexes, all infinite, which are not polyhedra. Their edge graphs are nets well-known to crystallographers, and we identify them explicitly. There also are 6 infinite families of "chiral" apeirohedra, which have two orbits on the flags such that adjacent flags lie in different orbits.Comment: Acta Crystallographica Section A (to appear

Polygonal Complexes and Graphs for Crystallographic Groups

The paper surveys highlights of the ongoing program to classify discrete polyhedral structures in Euclidean 3-space by distinguished transitivity properties of their symmetry groups, focussing in particular on various aspects of the classification of regular polygonal complexes, chiral polyhedra, and more generally, two-orbit polyhedra.Comment: 21 pages; In: Symmetry and Rigidity, (eds. R.Connelly, A.Ivic Weiss and W.Whiteley), Fields Institute Communications, to appea

Solving Hard Computational Problems Efficiently: Asymptotic Parametric Complexity 3-Coloring Algorithm

Many practical problems in almost all scientific and technological disciplines have been classified as computationally hard (NP-hard or even NP-complete). In life sciences, combinatorial optimization problems frequently arise in molecular biology, e.g., genome sequencing; global alignment of multiple genomes; identifying siblings or discovery of dysregulated pathways.In almost all of these problems, there is the need for proving a hypothesis about certain property of an object that can be present only when it adopts some particular admissible structure (an NP-certificate) or be absent (no admissible structure), however, none of the standard approaches can discard the hypothesis when no solution can be found, since none can provide a proof that there is no admissible structure. This article presents an algorithm that introduces a novel type of solution method to "efficiently" solve the graph 3-coloring problem; an NP-complete problem. The proposed method provides certificates (proofs) in both cases: present or absent, so it is possible to accept or reject the hypothesis on the basis of a rigorous proof. It provides exact solutions and is polynomial-time (i.e., efficient) however parametric. The only requirement is sufficient computational power, which is controlled by the parameter $\alpha\in\mathbb{N}$. Nevertheless, here it is proved that the probability of requiring a value of $\alpha>k$ to obtain a solution for a random graph decreases exponentially: $P(\alpha>k) \leq 2^{-(k+1)}$, making tractable almost all problem instances. Thorough experimental analyses were performed. The algorithm was tested on random graphs, planar graphs and 4-regular planar graphs. The obtained experimental results are in accordance with the theoretical expected results.Comment: Working pape

Enumeration of labelled 4-regular planar graphs

We present the first combinatorial scheme for counting labelled 4-regular planar graphs through a complete recursive decomposition. More precisely, we show that the exponential generating function of labelled 4-regular planar graphs can be computed effectively as the solution of a system of equations, from which the coefficients can be extracted. As a byproduct, we also enumerate labelled 3-connected 4-regular planar graphs, and simple 4-regular rooted maps