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

Narrow sieves for parameterized paths and packings

We present randomized algorithms for some well-studied, hard combinatorial problems: the k-path problem, the p-packing of q-sets problem, and the q-dimensional p-matching problem. Our algorithms solve these problems with high probability in time exponential only in the parameter (k, p, q) and using polynomial space; the constant bases of the exponentials are significantly smaller than in previous works. For example, for the k-path problem the improvement is from 2 to 1.66. We also show how to detect if a d-regular graph admits an edge coloring with $d$ colors in time within a polynomial factor of O(2^{(d-1)n/2}). Our techniques build upon and generalize some recently published ideas by I. Koutis (ICALP 2009), R. Williams (IPL 2009), and A. Bj\"orklund (STACS 2010, FOCS 2010)

Ninth and Tenth Order Virial Coefficients for Hard Spheres in D Dimensions

We evaluate the virial coefficients B_k for k<=10 for hard spheres in dimensions D=2,...,8. Virial coefficients with k even are found to be negative when D>=5. This provides strong evidence that the leading singularity for the virial series lies away from the positive real axis when D>=5. Further analysis provides evidence that negative virial coefficients will be seen for some k>10 for D=4, and there is a distinct possibility that negative virial coefficients will also eventually occur for D=3.Comment: 33 pages, 12 figure

Random walks on the Apollonian network with a single trap

Explicit determination of the mean first-passage time (MFPT) for trapping problem on complex media is a theoretical challenge. In this paper, we study random walks on the Apollonian network with a trap fixed at a given hub node (i.e. node with the highest degree), which are simultaneously scale-free and small-world. We obtain the precise analytic expression for the MFPT that is confirmed by direct numerical calculations. In the large system size limit, the MFPT approximately grows as a power-law function of the number of nodes, with the exponent much less than 1, which is significantly different from the scaling for some regular networks or fractals, such as regular lattices, Sierpinski fractals, T-graph, and complete graphs. The Apollonian network is the most efficient configuration for transport by diffusion among all previously studied structure.Comment: Definitive version accepted for publication in EPL (Europhysics Letters