Related papers: The opaque square
This paper proves an elementary topological fact about closed curves on surfaces, namely that by carefully smoothing an intersection point, one can reduce self-intersection by exactly $1$. This immediately implies a positive answer to a…
We introduce the concept of an obstacle skeleton which is a set of line segments inside a polygonal obstacle $\omega$ that can be used in place of $\omega$ when performing intersection tests for obstacle-avoiding network problems in the…
A small polygon is a polygon of unit diameter. The maximal perimeter and the maximal width of a convex small polygon with $n=2^s$ vertices are not known when $s \ge 4$. In this paper, we construct a family of convex small $n$-gons, $n=2^s$…
Synchronizing clocks in a distributed system in which processes communicate through messages with uncertain delays is subject to inherent errors. Prior work has shown upper and lower bounds on the best synchronization achievable in a…
Let $p_1,\ldots,p_n$ be a set of points in the unit square and let $T_1,\ldots,T_n$ be a set of $\delta$-tubes such that $T_j$ passes through $p_j$. We prove a lower bound for the number of incidences between the points and tubes under a…
For an input graph $G$, an additive spanner is a sparse subgraph $H$ whose shortest paths match those of $G$ up to small additive error. We prove two new lower bounds in the area of additive spanners: 1) We construct $n$-node graphs $G$ for…
Inspired by the boolean discrepancy problem, we study the following optimization problem which we term \textsc{Spherical Discrepancy}: given $m$ unit vectors $v_1, \dots, v_m$, find another unit vector $x$ that minimizes $\max_i \langle x,…
Let $S$ be a set of $n$ points in $\mathbb{R}^d$, where $d \geq 2$ is a constant, and let $H_1,H_2,\ldots,H_{m+1}$ be a sequence of vertical hyperplanes that are sorted by their first coordinates, such that exactly $n/m$ points of $S$ are…
We prove that in every metric space where no line contains all the points, there are at least $\Omega(n^{2/3})$ lines. This improves the previous $\Omega(\sqrt{n})$ lower bound on the number of lines in general metric space, and also…
This is an English translation of V. A. Zalgaller's article "On a problem of the shortest space curve of unit width" that appeared in $Matematicheskaya\ Fizika,\ Analiz,\ Geometriya$ v. 1 (1994) n. 3--4, 454--461. We refer interested…
We present a fixed-parameter tractable (FPT) algorithm to find a shortest curve that encloses a set of k required objects in the plane while paying a penalty for enclosing unwanted objects. The input is a set of interior-disjoint simple…
Fici and Saarela ([2]) conjectured that a binary word of length n contains at least $\lfloor n/4 \rfloor$ abelian squares. We slightly extend this conjecture and show that it holds in some special cases. In all other cases we have the…
We provide theoretical insights around the cutwidth of a graph and the One-Sided Crossing Minimization (OSCM) problem. OSCM was posed in the Parameterized Algorithms and Computational Experiments Challenge 2024, where the cutwidth of the…
String graphs, that is, intersection graphs of curves in the plane, have been studied since the 1960s. We provide an expository presentation of several results, including very recent ones: some string graphs require an exponential number of…
The square peg problem asks whether every continuous curve in the plane that starts and ends at the same point without self-intersecting contains four distinct corners of some square. Toeplitz conjectured in 1911 that this is indeed the…
A closed quasigeodesic is a closed curve on the surface of a polyhedron with at most $180^\circ$ of surface on both sides at all points; such curves can be locally unfolded straight. In 1949, Pogorelov proved that every convex polyhedron…
Circuit augmentation schemes are a family of combinatorial algorithms for linear programming that generalize the simplex method. To solve the linear program, they construct a so-called monotone circuit walk: They start at an initial vertex…
We construct a family of functions suitable for establishing lower bounds on the oracle complexity of first-order minimization of smooth strongly-convex functions. Based on this construction, we derive new lower bounds on the complexity of…
Given a set of pairwise disjoint polygonal obstacles in the plane, finding an obstacle-avoiding Euclidean shortest path between two points is a classical problem in computational geometry and has been studied extensively. The previous best…
Error bounds have been studied for more than seventy years, beginning with the seminal result of Hoffman (1952) [{\it J. Res. Natl. Bur. Standards}, 49 (1952), 263--265], which establishes an upper bound for the distance from an arbitrary…