Related papers: A hardness of approximation result in metric geome…

We prove that it is $\#\mathsf{P}$-complete to count the triangulations of a (non-simple) polygon.

The maximum intersection problem for a matroid and a greedoid, given by polynomial-time oracles, is shown $NP$-hard by expressing the satisfiability of boolean formulas in 3-conjunctive normal form as such an intersection. The corresponding…

We prove that it is NP-hard to dissect one simple orthogonal polygon into another using a given number of pieces, as is approximating the fewest pieces to within a factor of $1+1/1080-\varepsilon$.

The problem of finding a triangulation of a convex three-dimensional polytope with few tetrahedra is proved to be NP-hard. We discuss other related complexity results.

A map $f\colon K\to \mathbb R^d$ of a simplicial complex is an almost embedding if $f(\sigma)\cap f(\tau)=\emptyset$ whenever $\sigma,\tau$ are disjoint simplices of $K$. Theorem. Fix integers $d,k\ge2$ such that $d=\frac{3k}2+1$. (a)…

The polynomial hierarchy plays a central role in classical complexity theory. Here, we define a quantum generalization of the polynomial hierarchy, and initiate its study. We show that not only are there natural complete problems for the…

We consider the problem of computing the smallest possible distortion for embedding of a given n-point metric space into R^d, where d is fixed (and small). For d=1, it was known that approximating the minimum distortion with a factor better…

We consider the \emph{smallest superpolyomino problem}: given a set of colored polyominoes, find the smallest polyomino containing each input polyomino as a subshape. This problem is shown to be NP-hard, even when restricted to a set of…

In this note, we prove that the problem of computing the linear discrepancy of a given matrix is $\Pi_2$-hard, even to approximate within $9/8 - \epsilon$ factor for any $\epsilon > 0$. This strengthens the NP-hardness result of Li and…

We study the hardness of approximation of clause minimum and literal minimum representations of pure Horn functions in $n$ Boolean variables. We show that unless P=NP, it is not possible to approximate in polynomial time the minimum number…

Consider a set P of N random points on the unit sphere of dimension $d-1$, and the symmetrized set S = P union (-P). The halving polyhedron of S is defined as the convex hull of the set of centroids of N distinct points in S. We prove that…

We show that linearly constrained linear optimization over a Stiefel or Grassmann manifold is NP-hard in general. We show that the same is true for unconstrained quadratic optimization over a Stiefel manifold. We will show that unless…

A theorem is proved concerning approximation of analytic functions by multivariate polynomials in the $s$-dimensional hypercube. The geometric convergence rate is determined not by the usual notion of degree of a multivariate polynomial,…

We provide evidence that it is computationally difficult to approximate the partition function of the ferromagnetic q-state Potts model when q>2. Specifically we show that the partition function is hard for the complexity class #RHPi_1…

Parameterization and approximation are two popular ways of coping with NP-hard problems. More recently, the two have also been combined to derive many interesting results. We survey developments in the area both from the algorithmic and…

In this paper, we study the weighted $n$-dimensional badly approximable points on manifolds. Given a $C^n$ differentiable non-degenerate submanifold $\mathcal{U} \subset \mathbb{R}^n$, we will show that any countable intersection of the…

For any $\varepsilon > 0$, we prove that $k$-Dimensional Matching is hard to approximate within a factor of $k/(12 + \varepsilon)$ for large $k$ unless $\textsf{NP} \subseteq \textsf{BPP}$. Listed in Karp's 21 $\textsf{NP}$-complete…

We show that there is no $(1+\eps)$-approximation algorithm for the problem of covering points in the plane by minimum number of fat triangles of similar size (with the minimum angle of the triangles being close to 45 degrees). Here, the…

Let $D$ be the set of $n\times n$ positive semidefinite matrices of trace equal to one, also known as the set of density matrices. We prove two results on the hardness of approximating $D$ with polytopes. First, we show that if $0 <…

We consider the approximation of manifold-valued functions by embedding the manifold into a higher dimensional space, applying a vector-valued approximation operator and projecting the resulting vector back to the manifold. It is well known…