Acute triangles in triangulations on the plane with minimum degree at least 4

AbstractIn this paper, we show that every maximal plane graph with minimum degree at least 4 and m finite faces other than an octahedron can be drawn in the plane so that at least (m+3)/2 faces are acute triangles. Moreover, this bound is sharp

Recognizing and Drawing IC-planar Graphs

IC-planar graphs are those graphs that admit a drawing where no two crossed edges share an end-vertex and each edge is crossed at most once. They are a proper subfamily of the 1-planar graphs. Given an embedded IC-planar graph $G$ with $n$ vertices, we present an $O(n)$-time algorithm that computes a straight-line drawing of $G$ in quadratic area, and an $O(n^3)$-time algorithm that computes a straight-line drawing of $G$ with right-angle crossings in exponential area. Both these area requirements are worst-case optimal. We also show that it is NP-complete to test IC-planarity both in the general case and in the case in which a rotation system is fixed for the input graph. Furthermore, we describe a polynomial-time algorithm to test whether a set of matching edges can be added to a triangulated planar graph such that the resulting graph is IC-planar

Survey of two-dimensional acute triangulations

AbstractWe give a brief introduction to the topic of two-dimensional acute triangulations, mention results on related areas, survey existing achievements–with emphasis on recent activity–and list related open problems, both concrete and conceptual

Planar growth generates scale free networks

In this paper we introduce a model of spatial network growth in which nodes are placed at randomly selected locations on a unit square in $\mathbb{R}^2$, forming new connections to old nodes subject to the constraint that edges do not cross. The resulting network has a power law degree distribution, high clustering and the small world property. We argue that these characteristics are a consequence of the two defining features of the network formation procedure; growth and planarity conservation. We demonstrate that the model can be understood as a variant of random Apollonian growth and further propose a one parameter family of models with the Random Apollonian Network and the Deterministic Apollonian Network as extreme cases and our model as a midpoint between them. We then relax the planarity constraint by allowing edge crossings with some probability and find a smooth crossover from power law to exponential degree distributions when this probability is increased.Comment: 27 pages, 9 figure

Non-Euclidean geometry in nature

I describe the manifestation of the non-Euclidean geometry in the behavior of collective observables of some complex physical systems. Specifically, I consider the formation of equilibrium shapes of plants and statistics of sparse random graphs. For these systems I discuss the following interlinked questions: (i) the optimal embedding of plants leaves in the three-dimensional space, (ii) the spectral statistics of sparse random matrix ensembles.Comment: 52 pages, 21 figures, last section is rewritten, a reference to chaotic Hamiltonian systems is adde

Drawing graphs for cartographic applications

Graph Drawing is a relatively young area that combines elements of graph theory, algorithms, (computational) geometry and (computational) topology. Research in this field concentrates on developing algorithms for drawing graphs while satisfying certain aesthetic criteria. These criteria are often expressed in properties like edge complexity, number of edge crossings, angular resolutions, shapes of faces or graph symmetries and in general aim at creating a drawing of a graph that conveys the information to the reader in the best possible way. Graph drawing has applications in a wide variety of areas which include cartography, VLSI design and information visualization. In this thesis we consider several graph drawing problems. The first problem we address is rectilinear cartogram construction. A cartogram, also known as value-by-area map, is a technique used by cartographers to visualize statistical data over a set of geographical regions like countries, states or counties. The regions of a cartogram are deformed such that the area of a region corresponds to a particular geographic variable. The shapes of the regions depend on the type of cartogram. We consider rectilinear cartograms of constant complexity, that is cartograms where each region is a rectilinear polygon with a constant number of vertices. Whether a cartogram is good is determined by how closely the cartogram resembles the original map and how precisely the area of its regions describe the associated values. The cartographic error is defined for each region as jAc¡Asj=As, where Ac is the area of the region in the cartogram and As is the specified area of that region, given by the geographic variable to be shown. In this thesis we consider the construction of rectilinear cartograms that have correct adjacencies of the regions and zero cartographic error. We show that any plane triangulated graph admits a rectilinear cartogram where every region has at most 40 vertices which can be constructed in O(nlogn) time. We also present experimental results that show that in practice the algorithm works significantly better than suggested by the complexity bounds. In our experiments on real-world data we were always able to construct a cartogram where the average number of vertices per region does not exceed five. Since a rectangle has four vertices, this means that most of the regions of our rectilinear car tograms are in fact rectangles. Moreover, the maximum number vertices of each region in these cartograms never exceeded ten. The second problem we address in this thesis concerns cased drawings of graphs. The vertices of a drawing are commonly marked with a disk, but differentiating between vertices and edge crossings in a dense graph can still be difficult. Edge casing is a wellknown method—used, for example, in electrical drawings, when depicting knots, and, more generally, in information visualization—to alleviate this problem and to improve the readability of a drawing. A cased drawing orders the edges of each crossing and interrupts the lower edge in an appropriate neighborhood of the crossing. One can also envision that every edge is encased in a strip of the background color and that the casing of the upper edge covers the lower edge at the crossing. If there are no application-specific restrictions that dictate the order of the edges at each crossing, then we can in principle choose freely how to arrange them. However, certain orders will lead to a more readable drawing than others. In this thesis we formulate aesthetic criteria for a cased drawing as optimization problems and solve these problems. For most of the problems we present either a polynomial time algorithm or demonstrate that the problem is NP-hard. Finally we consider a combinatorial question in computational topology concerning three types of objects: closed curves in the plane, surfaces immersed in the plane, and surfaces embedded in space. In particular, we study casings of closed curves in the plane to decide whether these curves can be embedded as the boundaries of certain special surfaces. We show that it is NP-complete to determine whether an immersed disk is the projection of a surface embedded in space, or whether a curve is the boundary of an immersed surface in the plane that is not constrained to be a disk. However, when a casing is supplied with a self-intersecting curve, describing which component of the curve lies above and which below at each crossing, we can determine in time linear in the number of crossings whether the cased curve forms the projected boundary of a surface in space. As a related result, we show that an immersed surface with a single boundary curve that crosses itself n times has at most 2n=2 combinatorially distinct spatial embeddings and we discuss the existence of fixed-parameter tractable algorithms for related problems

Facets of Planar Graph Drawing

This thesis makes a contribution to the field of Graph Drawing, with a focus on the planarity drawing convention. The following three problems are considered. (1) Ordered Level Planarity: We introduce and study the problem Ordered Level Planarity which asks for a planar drawing of a graph such that vertices are placed at prescribed positions in the plane and such that every edge is realized as a y-monotone curve. This can be interpreted as a variant of Level Planarity in which the vertices on each level appear in a prescribed total order. We establish a complexity dichotomy with respect to both the maximum degree and the level-width, that is, the maximum number of vertices that share a level. Our study of Ordered Level Planarity is motivated by connections to several other graph drawing problems. With reductions from Ordered Level Planarity, we show NP-hardness of multiple problems whose complexity was previously open, and strengthen several previous hardness results. In particular, our reduction to Clustered Level Planarity generates instances with only two nontrivial clusters. This answers a question posed by Angelini, Da Lozzo, Di Battista, Frati, and Roselli [2015]. We settle the complexity of the Bi-Monotonicity problem, which was proposed by Fulek, Pelsmajer, Schaefer, and Stefankovic [2013]. We also present a reduction to Manhattan Geodesic Planarity, showing that a previously [2009] claimed polynomial time algorithm is incorrect unless P=NP. (2) Two-page book embeddings of triconnected planar graphs: We show that every triconnected planar graph of maximum degree five is a subgraph of a Hamiltonian planar graph or, equivalently, it admits a two-page book embedding. In fact, our result is more general: we only require vertices of separating 3-cycles to have degree at most five, all other vertices may have arbitrary degree. This degree bound is tight: we describe a family of triconnected planar graphs that cannot be realized on two pages and where every vertex of a separating 3-cycle has degree at most six. Our results strengthen earlier work by Heath [1995] and by Bauernöppel [1987] and, independently, Bekos, Gronemann, and Raftopoulou [2016], who showed that planar graphs of maximum degree three and four, respectively, can always be realized on two pages. The proof is constructive and yields a quadratic time algorithm to realize the given graph on two pages. (3) Convexity-increasing morphs: We study the problem of convexifying drawings of planar graphs. Given any planar straight-line drawing of an internally 3-connected graph, we show how to morph the drawing to one with strictly convex faces while maintaining planarity at all times. Our morph is convexity-increasing, meaning that once an angle is convex, it remains convex. We give an efficient algorithm that constructs such a morph as a composition of a linear number of steps where each step either moves vertices along horizontal lines or moves vertices along vertical lines. Moreover, we show that a linear number of steps is worst-case optimal.Diese Arbeit behandelt drei unterschiedliche Problemstellungen aus der Disziplin des Graphenzeichnens (Graph Drawing). Bei jedem der behandelten Probleme ist die gesuchte Darstellung planar. (1) Ordered Level Planarity: Wir führen das Problem Ordered Level Planarity ein, bei dem es darum geht, einen Graph so zu zeichnen, dass jeder Knoten an einer vorgegebenen Position der Ebene platziert wird und die Kanten als y-monotone Kurven dargestellt werden. Dies kann als eine Variante von Level Planarity interpretiert werden, bei der die Knoten jedes Levels in einer vorgeschriebenen Reihenfolge platziert werden müssen. Wir klassifizieren die Eingaben bezüglich ihrer Komplexität in Abhängigkeit von sowohl dem Maximalgrad, als auch der maximalen Anzahl von Knoten, die demselben Level zugeordnet sind. Wir motivieren die Ergebnisse, indem wir Verbindungen zu einigen anderen Graph Drawing Problemen herleiten: Mittels Reduktionen von Ordered Level Planarity zeigen wir die NP-Schwere einiger Probleme, deren Komplexität bislang offen war. Insbesondere wird gezeigt, dass Clustered Level Planarity bereits für Instanzen mit zwei nichttrivialen Clustern NP-schwer ist, was eine Frage von Angelini, Da Lozzo, Di Battista, Frati und Roselli [2015] beantwortet. Wir zeigen die NP-Schwere des Bi-Monotonicity Problems und beantworten damit eine Frage von Fulek, Pelsmajer, Schaefer und Stefankovic [2013]. Außerdem wird eine Reduktion zu Manhattan Geodesic Planarity angegeben. Dies zeigt, dass ein bestehender [2009] Polynomialzeitalgorithmus für dieses Problem inkorrekt ist, es sei denn, dass P=NP ist. (2) Bucheinbettungen von dreifach zusammenhängenden planaren Graphen mit zwei Seiten: Wir zeigen, dass jeder dreifach zusammenhängende planare Graph mit Maximalgrad 5 Teilgraph eines Hamiltonischen planaren Graphen ist. Dies ist äquivalent dazu, dass ein solcher Graph eine Bucheinbettung auf zwei Seiten hat. Der Beweis ist konstruktiv und zeigt in der Tat sogar, dass es für die Realisierbarkeit nur notwendig ist, den Grad von Knoten separierender 3-Kreise zu beschränken - die übrigen Knoten können beliebig hohe Grade aufweisen. Dieses Ergebnis ist bestmöglich: Wenn die Gradschranke auf 6 abgeschwächt wird, gibt es Gegenbeispiele. Diese Ergebnisse verbessern Resultate von Heath [1995] und von Bauernöppel [1987] und, unabhängig davon, Bekos, Gronemann und Raftopoulou [2016], die gezeigt haben, dass planare Graphen mit Maximalgrad 3 beziehungsweise 4 auf zwei Seiten realisiert werden können. (3) Konvexitätssteigernde Deformationen: Wir zeigen, dass jede planare geradlinige Zeichnung eines intern dreifach zusammenhängenden planaren Graphen stetig zu einer solchen deformiert werden kann, in der jede Fläche ein konvexes Polygon ist. Dabei erhält die Deformation die Planarität und ist konvexitätssteigernd - sobald ein Winkel konvex ist, bleibt er konvex. Wir geben einen effizienten Algorithmus an, der eine solche Deformation berechnet, die aus einer asymptotisch optimalen Anzahl von Schritten besteht. In jedem Schritt bewegen sich entweder alle Knoten entlang horizontaler oder entlang vertikaler Geraden