English

Geometric Thickness of Multigraphs is $\exists \mathbb{R}$-complete

Computational Geometry 2024-07-01 v2 Discrete Mathematics Data Structures and Algorithms

Abstract

We say that a (multi)graph G=(V,E)G = (V,E) has geometric thickness tt if there exists a straight-line drawing φ:VR2\varphi : V \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^2 and a tt-coloring of its edges where no two edges sharing a point in their relative interior have the same color. The \textsc{Geometric Thickness} problem asks whether a given multigraph has geometric thickness at most tt. This problem was shown to be NP-hard for t=2t=2 [Durocher, Gethner, and Mondal, CG 2016]. In this paper, we settle the computational complexity of \textsc{Geometric Thickness} by showing that it is R\exists \mathbb{R}-complete already for thickness 3030. Moreover, our reduction shows that the problem is R\exists \mathbb{R}-complete for 43924392-planar graphs, where a graph is kk-planar if it admits a topological drawing with at most kk crossings per edge. In the course of our paper, we answer previous questions on geometric thickness and on other related problems, in particular that simultaneous graph embeddings of 3131 edge-disjoint graphs and pseudo-segment stretchability with chromatic number 3030 are R\exists \mathbb{R}-complete.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2312.05010,
  title  = {Geometric Thickness of Multigraphs is $\exists \mathbb{R}$-complete},
  author = {Henry Förster and Philipp Kindermann and Tillmann Miltzow and Irene Parada and Soeren Terziadis and Birgit Vogtenhuber},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.05010},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

19 pages, 9 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T13:44:59.574Z