There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

We will review some of the major results in random graphs and some of the more challenging open problems. We will cover algorithmic and structural questions. We will touch on newer models, including those related to the WWW.

Random graphs

We consider the problem of detecting communities or modules in networks, groups of vertices with a higher-than-average density of edges connecting them. Previous work indicates that a robust approach to this problem is the maximization of the benefit function known as ``modularity'' over possible divisions of a network. Here we show that this maximization process can be written in terms of the eigenspectrum of a matrix we call the modularity matrix, which plays a role in community detection similar to that played by the graph Laplacian in graph partitioning calculations. This result leads us to a number of possible algorithms for detecting community structure, as well as several other results, including a spectral measure of bipartite structure in networks and a centrality measure that identifies vertices that occupy central positions within the communities to which they belong. The algorithms and measures proposed are illustrated with applications to a variety of real-world complex networks.

/pdf/finding-community-structure-in-networks-using-the-4em5so8glh.pdf

Finding community structure in networks using the eigenvectors of matrices

We present two algorithms for the approximate nearest neighbor problem in high-dimensional spaces. For data sets of size n living in R d , the algorithms require space that is only polynomial in n and d, while achieving query times that are sub-linear in n and polynomial in d. We also show applications to other high-dimensional geometric problems, such as the approximate minimum spanning tree. The article is based on the material from the authors' STOC'98 and FOCS'01 papers. It unifies, generalizes and simplifies the results from those papers.

/pdf/approximate-nearest-neighbors-towards-removing-the-curse-of-27lmlz5prr.pdf

Approximate nearest neighbors: towards removing the curse of dimensionality

Computational geometry is concerned with the design and analysis of algorithms for geometrical problems. In addition, other more practically oriented, areas of computer science— such as computer graphics, computer-aided design, robotics, pattern recognition, and operations research—give rise to problems that inherently are geometrical. This is one reason computational geometry has attracted enormous research interest in the past decade and is a well-established area today. (For standard sources, we refer to the survey article by Lee and Preparata [19841 and to the textbooks by Preparata and Shames [1985] and Edelsbrunner [1987bl.) Readers familiar with the literature of computational geometry will have noticed, especially in the last few years, an increasing interest in a geometrical construct called the Voronoi diagram. This trend can also be observed in combinatorial geometry and in a considerable number of articles in natural science journals that address the Voronoi diagram under different names specific to the respective area. Given some number of points in the plane, their Voronoi diagram divides the plane according to the nearest-neighbor

Voronoi diagrams—a survey of a fundamental geometric data structure

The 2-blowup of a graph is obtained by replacing each vertex with two non-adjacent copies; a graph is biplanar if it is the union of two planar graphs. We disprove a conjecture of Gethner that 2-blowups of planar graphs are biplanar: iterated Kleetopes are counterexamples. Additionally, we construct biplanar drawings of 2-blowups of planar graphs whose duals have two-path induced path partitions, and drawings with split thickness two of 2-blowups of 3-chromatic planar graphs.

On the Biplanarity of Blowups

We show that several problems of compacting orthogonal graph drawings to use the minimum number of rows, area, length of longest edge or total edge length cannot be approximated better than within a polynomial factor of optimal in polynomial time unless P = NP. We also provide a fixed-parameter-tractable algorithm for testing whether a drawing can be compacted to a small number of rows.

Inapproximability of Orthogonal Compaction

We show how to construct a cubic partial cube from any simplicial arrangement of lines or pseudolines in the projective plane. As a consequence, we find nine new infinite families of cubic partial cubes as well as many sporadic examples.

Cubic Partial Cubes from Simplicial Arrangements

We characterize the triples of interior angles that are possible in non-self-crossing triangles with circular-arc sides, and we prove that a given cyclic sequence of angles can be realized by a non-self-crossing polygon with circular-arc sides whenever all angles are at most pi. As a consequence of these results, we prove that every cactus has a planar Lombardi drawing (a drawing with edges depicted as circular arcs, meeting at equal angles at each vertex) for its natural embedding in which every cycle of the cactus is a face of the drawing. However, there exist planar embeddings of cacti that do not have planar Lombardi drawings.

Angles of Arc-Polygons and Lombardi Drawings of Cacti

Suppose we are given an environment consisting of axis-parallel and diagonal line segments with integer endpoints, each of which may be reﬂective or non-reﬂective, with integer endpoints, and an initial position for a light ray passing through points of the integer grid. Then in time polynomial in the number of segments and in the number of bits needed to specify the coordinates of the input, we can determine the eventual fate of the reﬂected ray.

David Eppstein

Papers

On the Biplanarity of Blowups

Inapproximability of Orthogonal Compaction

Cubic Partial Cubes from Simplicial Arrangements

Angles of Arc-Polygons and Lombardi Drawings of Cacti

Reflections in an octagonal mirror maze