5 research outputs found
Strictly convex drawings of planar graphs
Every three-connected planar graph with n vertices has a drawing on an O(n^2)
x O(n^2) grid in which all faces are strictly convex polygons. These drawings
are obtained by perturbing (not strictly) convex drawings on O(n) x O(n) grids.
More generally, a strictly convex drawing exists on a grid of size O(W) x
O(n^4/W), for any choice of a parameter W in the range n<W<n^2. Tighter bounds
are obtained when the faces have fewer sides.
In the proof, we derive an explicit lower bound on the number of primitive
vectors in a triangle.Comment: 20 pages, 13 figures. to be published in Documenta Mathematica. The
revision includes numerous small additions, corrections, and improvements, in
particular: - a discussion of the constants in the O-notation, after the
statement of thm.1. - a different set-up and clarification of the case
distinction for Lemma
Expansive Motions and the Polytope of Pointed Pseudo-Triangulations
We introduce the polytope of pointed pseudo-triangulations of a point set in
the plane, defined as the polytope of infinitesimal expansive motions of the
points subject to certain constraints on the increase of their distances. Its
1-skeleton is the graph whose vertices are the pointed pseudo-triangulations of
the point set and whose edges are flips of interior pseudo-triangulation edges.
For points in convex position we obtain a new realization of the
associahedron, i.e., a geometric representation of the set of triangulations of
an n-gon, or of the set of binary trees on n vertices, or of many other
combinatorial objects that are counted by the Catalan numbers. By considering
the 1-dimensional version of the polytope of constrained expansive motions we
obtain a second distinct realization of the associahedron as a perturbation of
the positive cell in a Coxeter arrangement.
Our methods produce as a by-product a new proof that every simple polygon or
polygonal arc in the plane has expansive motions, a key step in the proofs of
the Carpenter's Rule Theorem by Connelly, Demaine and Rote (2000) and by
Streinu (2000).Comment: 40 pages, 7 figures. Changes from v1: added some comments (specially
to the "Further remarks" in Section 5) + changed to final book format. This
version is to appear in "Discrete and Computational Geometry -- The
Goodman-Pollack Festschrift" (B. Aronov, S. Basu, J. Pach, M. Sharir, eds),
series "Algorithms and Combinatorics", Springer Verlag, Berli
Non-crossing frameworks with non-crossing reciprocals
We study non-crossing frameworks in the plane for which the classical
reciprocal on the dual graph is also non-crossing. We give a complete
description of the self-stresses on non-crossing frameworks whose reciprocals
are non-crossing, in terms of: the types of faces (only pseudo-triangles and
pseudo-quadrangles are allowed); the sign patterns in the self-stress; and a
geometric condition on the stress vectors at some of the vertices.
As in other recent papers where the interplay of non-crossingness and
rigidity of straight-line plane graphs is studied, pseudo-triangulations show
up as objects of special interest. For example, it is known that all planar
Laman circuits can be embedded as a pseudo-triangulation with one non-pointed
vertex. We show that if such an embedding is sufficiently generic, then the
reciprocal is non-crossing and again a pseudo-triangulation embedding of a
planar Laman circuit. For a singular (i.e., non-generic) pseudo-triangulation
embedding of a planar Laman circuit, the reciprocal is still non-crossing and a
pseudo-triangulation, but its underlying graph may not be a Laman circuit.
Moreover, all the pseudo-triangulations which admit a non-crossing reciprocal
arise as the reciprocals of such, possibly singular, stresses on
pseudo-triangulation embeddings of Laman circuits.
All self-stresses on a planar graph correspond to liftings to piece-wise
linear surfaces in 3-space. We prove characteristic geometric properties of the
lifts of such non-crossing reciprocal pairs.Comment: 32 pages, 23 figure
Integer Point Sets Minimizing Average Pairwise L1-Distance: What is the Optimal Shape of a Town?
An n-town, for a natural number n, is a group of n buildings, each occupying
a distinct position on a 2-dimensional integer grid. If we measure the distance
between two buildings along the axis-parallel street grid, then an n-town has
optimal shape if the sum of all pairwise Manhattan distances is minimized. This
problem has been studied for cities, i.e., the limiting case of very large n.
For cities, it is known that the optimal shape can be described by a
differential equation, for which no closed-form is known. We show that optimal
n-towns can be computed in O(n^7.5) time. This is also practically useful, as
it allows us to compute optimal solutions up to n=80.Comment: 26 pages, 6 figures, to appear in Computational Geometry: Theory and
Application