The \emph{distance-number} of a graph $G$ is the minimum number of distinct edge-lengths over all straight-line drawings of $G$ in the plane. This definition generalises many well-known concepts in combinatorial geometry. We consider the distance-number of trees, graphs with no $K^-_4$-minor, complete bipartite graphs, complete graphs, and cartesian products. Our main results concern the distance-number of graphs with bounded degree. We prove that $n$-vertex graphs with bounded maximum degree and bounded treewidth have distance-number in $\mathcal{O}(\log n)$. To conclude such a logarithmic upper bound, both the degree and the treewidth need to be bounded. In particular, we construct graphs with treewidth 2 and polynomial distance-number. Similarly, we prove that there exist graphs with maximum degree 5 and arbitrarily large distance-number. Moreover, as $Δ$ increases the existential lower bound on the distance-number of $Δ$-regular graphs tends to $Ω(n^{0.864138})$.
A $d$-dimensional hypercube drawing of a graph represents the vertices by distinct points in $\{0,1\}^d$, such that the line-segments representing the edges do not cross. We study lower and upper bounds on the minimum number of dimensions in hypercube drawing of a given graph. This parameter turns out to be related to Sidon sets and antimagic injections.
It is shown that for any outerplanar graph G there is a one to one mapping of the vertices of G to the plane, so that the number of distinct distances between pairs of connected vertices is at most three. This settles a problem of Carmi, Dujmovic, Morin and Wood. The proof combines (elementary) geometric, combinatorial, algebraic and probabilistic arguments.
We show that every outerplanar graph $G$ can be linearly embedded in the plane such that the number of distinct distances between pairs of adjacent vertices is at most thirteen and there is no intersection between the image of a vertex and that of an edge not containing it. This extends the work of Alon and the second author, where only overlap between vertices was disallowed, thus settling a problem posed by Carmi, Dujmović, Morin and Wood.
A \emph{three-dimensional grid drawing} of a graph is a placement of the vertices at distinct points with integer coordinates, such that the straight line segments representing the edges do not cross. Our aim is to produce three-dimensional grid drawings with small bounding box volume. We prove that every $n$-vertex graph with bounded degeneracy has a three-dimensional grid drawing with $O(n^{3/2})$ volume. This is the broadest class of graphs admiting such drawings. A three-dimensional grid drawing of a directed graph is \emph{upward} if every arc points up in the z-direction. We prove that e…
We consider straight-line outerplanar drawings of outerplanar graphs in which a small number of distinct edge slopes are used, that is, the segments representing edges are parallel to a small number of directions. We prove that $Δ-1$ edge slopes suffice for every outerplanar graph with maximum degree $Δ\ge 4$. This improves on the previous bound of $O(Δ^5)$, which was shown for planar partial 3-trees, a superclass of outerplanar graphs. The bound is tight: for every $Δ\ge 4$ there is an outerplanar graph with maximum degree $Δ$ that requires at least $Δ-1$ distinct edge slopes in an outerplana…
Some graphs admit drawings in the Euclidean k-space in such a (natu- ral) way, that edges are represented as line segments of unit length. Such drawings will be called k dimensional unit distance representations. When two non-adjacent vertices are drawn in the same point, we say that the representation is degenerate. The dimension (the Euclidean dimension) of a graph is defined to be the minimum integer k needed that a given graph has non-degenerate k dimensional unit distance representation (with the property that non-adjacent vertices are mapped to points, that are not distance one appart). …
A good drawing of a simple graph is a drawing on the sphere or, equivalently, in the plane in which vertices are drawn as distinct points, edges are drawn as Jordan arcs connecting their end vertices, and any pair of edges intersects at most once. In any good drawing, the edges of three pairwise connected vertices form a Jordan curve which we call a triangle. We say that a triangle is empty if one of the two connected components it induces does not contain any of the remaining vertices of the drawing of the graph. We show that the number of empty triangles in any good drawing of the complete g…
The "slope-number" of a graph $G$ is the minimum number of distinct edge slopes in a straight-line drawing of $G$ in the plane. We prove that for $Δ\geq5$ and all large $n$, there is a $Δ$-regular $n$-vertex graph with slope-number at least $n^{1-\frac{8+ε}{Δ+4}}$. This is the best known lower bound on the slope-number of a graph with bounded degree. We prove upper and lower bounds on the slope-number of complete bipartite graphs. We prove a general upper bound on the slope-number of an arbitrary graph in terms of its bandwidth. It follows that the slope-number of interval graphs, cocomparabil…
Determining whether there exists a graph such that its crossing number and pair crossing number are distinct is an important open problem in geometric graph theory. We show that $\textit{cr}(G)=O(\mathop{\mathrm{pcr}}(G)^{3/2})$ for every graph $G$, this improves the previous best bound by a logarithmic factor. Answering a question of Pach and Tóth, we prove that the bisection width (and, in fact, the cutwidth as well) of a graph $G$ with degree sequence $d_1,d_2,\dots,d_n$ satisfies $\mathop{\mathrm{bw}}(G)=O\big(\sqrt{\mathop{\mathrm{pcr}}(G)+\sum_{k=1}^n d_k^2}\big)$. Then we show that ther…
In this paper, some special distance spectral properties of graphs are considered. Concretely, we recursively construct an infinite family of trees with distance eigenvalue $-1$, and determine all $\{C_3,C_4\}$-free connected graphs with three distinct distance eigenvalues of which the smallest one is equal to $-3$, which partially answers a problem posed by Koolen, Hayat and Iqbal [Linear Algebra Appl. 505 (2016) 97--108]. Furthermore, we characterize all trees with three distinct distance eigenvalues.
We improve the current best bound for distinct distances on non-ruled algebraic surfaces in ${\mathbb R}^3$. In particular, we show that $n$ points on such a surface span $Ω\left(n^{32/39-\varepsilon}\right)$ distinct distances, for any $\varepsilon>0$. Our proof adapts the proof of Székely for the planar case, which is based on the crossing lemma. As part of our proof for distinct distances on surfaces, we also obtain new results for distinct distances between circles in ${\mathbb R}^3$. Consider point sets ${\mathcal P}_1$ and ${\mathcal P}_2$ of respective sizes $m$ and $n$, such that each …
Let $Γ$ be a distance-regular graph with diameter $d$ and Kneser graph $K=Γ_d$, the distance-$d$ graph of $Γ$. We say that $Γ$ is partially antipodal when $K$ has fewer distinct eigenvalues than $Γ$. In particular, this is the case of antipodal distance-regular graphs ($K$ with only two distinct eigenvalues), and the so-called half-antipodal distance-regular graphs ($K$ with only one negative eigenvalue). We provide a characterization of partially antipodal distance-regular graphs (among regular graphs with $d$ distinct eigenvalues) in terms of the spectrum and the mean number of vertices at m…
It is shown that given a set of $N$ points in the plane or on the sphere, there is a subset of size $\gtrsim N^{1/3}/\log N$ with all pairwise distances between points distinct.
A homogeneous set of $n$ points in the $d$-dimensional Euclidean space determines at least $Ω(n^{2d/(d^2+1)} / \log^{c(d)} n)$ distinct distances for a constant $c(d)>0$. In three-space, we slightly improve our general bound and show that a homogeneous set of $n$ points determines at least $Ω(n^{.6091})$ distinct distances.
Let the Kneser graph $K$ of a distance-regular graph $Γ$ be the graph on the same vertex set as $Γ$, where two vertices are adjacent when they have maximal distance in $Γ$. We study the situation where the Bose-Mesner algebra of $Γ$ is not generated by the adjacency matrix of $K$. In particular, we obtain strong results in the so-called `half antipodal' case.
How to draw the vertices of a complete multipartite graph $G$ on different points of a bounded $d$-dimensional integer grid, such that the sum of squared distances between vertices of $G$ is (i) minimized or (ii) maximized? For both problems we provide a characterization of the solutions. For the particular case $d=1$, our solution for (i) also settles the minimum-2-sum problem for complete bipartite graphs; the minimum-2-sum problem was defined by Juvan and Mohar in 1992. Weighted centroidal Voronoi tessellations are the solution for (ii). Such drawings are related with Laplacian eigenvalues …
Let $P$ be a set of $n$ points in the plane that determines at most $n/5$ distinct distances. We show that no line can contain more than $O(n^{43/52}{\rm polylog}(n))$ points of $P$. We also show a similar result for rectangular distances, equivalent to distances in the Minkowski plane, where the distance between a pair of points is the area of the axis-parallel rectangle that they span.
Topological drawings are natural representations of graphs in the plane, where vertices are represented by points, and edges by curves connecting the points. Topological drawings of complete graphs and of complete bipartite graphs have been studied extensively in the context of crossing number problems. We consider a natural class of simple topological drawings of complete bipartite graphs, in which we require that one side of the vertex set bipartition lies on the outer boundary of the drawing. We investigate the combinatorics of such drawings. For this purpose, we define combinatorial encodi…
Let $p_1,p_2,p_3$ be three non-collinear points in the plane, and let $P$ be a set of $n$ other points in the plane. We show that the number of distinct distances between $p_1,p_2,p_3$ and the points of $P$ is $Ω(n^{6/11})$, improving the lower bound $Ω(n^{0.502})$ of Elekes and Szabó \cite{ESz} (and considerably simplifying the analysis).
We give a shorter proof of a slightly weaker version of a theorem of Nets Katz and the author. We prove that if a set of $L$ lines in $\mathbb{R}^3$ contains at most $L^{1/2}$ lines in any low degree algebraic surface, then the number of $r$-rich points is at most $C_εL^{(3/2) + ε} r^{-2}$. Nets and I used this estimate to prove a distinct distance estimate for points in the plane. With the slightly weaker theorem in this paper, we get a slightly weaker distinct distance estimate: any set of $N$ points in $\mathbb{R}^2$ determines at least $c_εN^{1 - ε}$ distinct distances.
We consider the problem of determining the number of distinct distances between two point sets in $\mathbb{R}^2$ where one point set $\mathcal{P}_1$ of size $m$ lies on a real algebraic curve of fixed degree $r$, and the other point set $\mathcal{P}_2$ of size $n$ is arbitrary. We prove that the number of distinct distances between the point sets, $D(\mathcal{P}_1,\mathcal{P}_2)$, satisfies $D(\mathcal{P}_1,\mathcal{P}_2) = Ω(m^{1/2}n^{1/2}\log^{-1/2}n)$ when $m = Ω(n^{1/2}\log^{-1/3}n)$ and $D(\mathcal{P}_1,\mathcal{P}_2) = Ω(n^{1/2} m^{1/3})$ when $m=O(n^{1/2}\log^{-1/3}n)$ This generalizes …
We extend the notion of canonical ordering (initially developed for planar triangulations and 3-connected planar maps) to cylindric (essentially simple) triangulations and more generally to cylindric (essentially internally) $3$-connected maps. This allows us to extend the incremental straight-line drawing algorithm of de Fraysseix, Pach and Pollack (in the triangulated case) and of Kant (in the $3$-connected case) to this setting. Precisely, for any cylindric essentially internally $3$-connected map $G$ with $n$ vertices, we can obtain in linear time a periodic (in $x$) straight-line drawing …
We study the problem of embedding graphs in the plane as good geometric spanners. That is, for a graph $G$, the goal is to construct a straight-line drawing $Γ$ of $G$ in the plane such that, for any two vertices $u$ and $v$ of $G$, the ratio between the minimum length of any path from $u$ to $v$ and the Euclidean distance between $u$ and $v$ is small. The maximum such ratio, over all pairs of vertices of $G$, is the spanning ratio of $Γ$. First, we show that deciding whether a graph admits a straight-line drawing with spanning ratio $1$, a proper straight-line drawing with spanning ratio $1$,…
We introduce the bisector energy of an $n$-point set $P$ in $\mathbb{R}^2$, defined as the number of quadruples $(a,b,c,d)$ from $P$ such that $a$ and $b$ determine the same perpendicular bisector as $c$ and $d$. If no line or circle contains $M(n)$ points of $P$, then we prove that the bisector energy is $O(M(n)^{\frac{2}{5}}n^{\frac{12}{5}+ε} + M(n)n^2).$. We also prove the lower bound $Ω(M(n)n^2)$, which matches our upper bound when $M(n)$ is large. We use our upper bound on the bisector energy to obtain two rather different results: (i) If $P$ determines $O(n/\sqrt{\log n})$ distinct dista…
We study Extremal Combinatorics problems where local properties are used to derive global properties. That is, we consider a given configuration where every small piece of the configuration satisfies some restriction, and use this local property to derive global properties of the entire configuration. We study one such Ramsey problem of Erdős and Shelah, where the configurations are complete graphs with colored edges and every small induced subgraph contains many distinct colors. Our bounds for this Ramsey problem show that the known probabilistic construction is tight in various cases. We stu…
The reciprocal sum of Zhang sequence is not equal to the Distinct Distance Constant. This note introduces a $B_2$-sequence with larger reciprocal sum, and provides a more precise estimation of the reciprocal sums of Mian-Chowla sequence and Zhang sequence.
For a graph $G$, and two distinct vertices $u$ and $v$ of $G$, let $n_G(u,v)$ be the number of vertices of $G$ that are closer in $G$ to $u$ than to $v$. Miklavič and Šparl (arXiv:2011.01635v1) define the distance-unbalancedness of $G$ as the sum of $|n_G(u,v)-n_G(v,u)|$ over all unordered pairs of distinct vertices $u$ and $v$ of $G$. Confirming one of their conjectures, we show that the stars minimize the distance-unbalancedness among all trees of a fixed order.
Let P_1 and P_2 be two sets of points in the plane, so that P_1 is contained in a line L_1, P_2 is contained in a line L_2, and L_1 and L_2 are neither parallel nor orthogonal. Then the number of distinct distances determined by the pairs of P_1xP_2 is Ω(\min{|P_1|^{2/3}|P_2|^{2/3},|P_1|^2, |P_2|^2}). In particular, if |P_1|=|P_2|=m, then the number of these distinct distances is Ω(m^{4/3}), improving upon the previous bound Ω(m^{5/4}) of Elekes.
Let $S$ be a set of points in $\mathbb{R}^2$ contained in a circle and $P$ an unrestricted point set in $\mathbb{R}^2$. We prove the number of distinct distances between points in $S$ and points in $P$ is at least $\min(|S||P|^{1/4-\varepsilon},|S|^{2/3}|P|^{2/3},|S|^2,|P|^2)$. This builds on work of Pach and De Zeeuw, Bruner and Sharir, McLaughlin and Omar and Mathialagan on distances between pairs of sets.
We consider the number of distinct distances between two finite sets of points in ${\bf R}^k$, for any constant dimension $k\ge 2$, where one set $P_1$ consists of $n$ points on a line $l$, and the other set $P_2$ consists of $m$ arbitrary points, such that no hyperplane orthogonal to $l$ and no hypercylinder having $l$ as its axis contains more than $O(1)$ points of $P_2$. The number of distinct distances between $P_1$ and $P_2$ is then $$ Ω\left(\min\left\{ n^{2/3}m^{2/3},\; \frac{n^{10/11}m^{4/11}}{\log^{2/11}m},\; n^2,\; m^2\right\}\right) . $$ Without the assumption on $P_2$, there exist …
In this paper, we introduce the notion of "geodesic cover" for Fuchsian groups, which summons copies of fundamental polygons in the hyperbolic plane to cover pairs of representatives realizing distances in the corresponding hyperbolic surface. Then we use estimates of geodesic-covering numbers to study the distinct distances problem in hyperbolic surfaces. Especially, for $Y$ from a large class of hyperbolic surfaces, we establish the nearly optimal bound $\geq c(Y)N/\log N$ for distinct distances determined by any $N$ points in $Y$, where $c(Y)>0$ is some constant depending only on $Y$. In pa…
We show that for $m$ points and $n$ lines in the real plane, the number of distinct distances between the points and the lines is $Ω(m^{1/5}n^{3/5})$, as long as $m^{1/2}\le n\le m^2$. We also prove that for any $m$ points in the plane, not all on a line, the number of distances between these points and the lines that they span is $Ω(m^{4/3})$. The problem of bounding the number of distinct point-line distances can be reduced to the problem of bounding the number of tangent pairs among a finite set of lines and a finite set of circles in the plane, and we believe that this latter question is o…
Let $P$ be a set of $n$ points in the real plane contained in an algebraic curve $C$ of degree $d$. We prove that the number of distinct distances determined by $P$ is at least $c_d n^{4/3}$, unless $C$ contains a line or a circle. We also prove the lower bound $c_d' \min(m^{2/3}n^{2/3}, m^2, n^2)$ for the number of distinct distances between $m$ points on one irreducible plane algebraic curve and $n$ points on another, unless the two curves are parallel lines, orthogonal lines, or concentric circles. This generalizes a result on distances between lines of Sharir, Sheffer, and Solymosi in arXi…
Given sets $\mathcal{P}, \mathcal{Q} \subseteq \mathbb{R}^2$ of sizes $m$ and $n$ respectively, we are interested in the number of distinct distances spanned by $\mathcal{P} \times \mathcal{Q}$. Let $D(m, n)$ denote the minimum number of distances determined by sets in $\mathbb{R}^2$ of sizes $m$ and $n$ respectively, where $m \leq n$. Elekes \cite{CircleGrids} showed that $D(m, n) = O(\sqrt{mn})$ when $m \leq n^{1/3}$. For $m \geq n^{1/3}$, we have the upper bound $D(m, n) = O(n/\sqrt{\log n})$ as in the classical distinct distances problem. In this work, we show that Elekes' construction is …
Given a set of points $P \subset \mathbb F_q^2$ such that $|P|\geq q^{3/2}$ it is established that $|P|$ determines $Ω(q^2)$ distinct perpendicular bisectors. It is also proven that, if $|P| \geq q^{4/3}$, then for a positive proportion of points $a \in P$, we have $$|\{\| a- b\|: b \in P\}|=Ω(q),$$ where $\|a- b\|$ is the distance between points $a$ and $b$. The latter result represents an improvement on a result of Chapman et al. (arxiv:0903.4218).
Every set of points $\mathcal{P}$ determines $Ω(|\mathcal{P}| / \log |\mathcal{P}|)$ distances. A close version of this was initially conjectured by Erdős in 1946 and rather recently proved by Guth and Katz. We show that when near this lower bound, a point set $\mathcal{P}$ of the form $A \times A$ must satisfy $|A - A| \ll |A|^{2-\frac{2}{7}} \log^{\frac{1}{7}} |A|$. This improves recent results of Hanson and Roche-Newton.
It is widely believed that point sets in the plane which determine few distinct distances must have some special structure. In particular, such sets are believed to be similar to a lattice. This note considers two different ways to quantify this idea. Firstly, improving on a result of Hanson (see arXiv:1607.03442), it is proven that if $P= A \times A$ with $A \subset \mathbb R$ and $P$ determines $O(|A|^2)$ distinct distances, then $|A-A|=O\left(|A|^{2-\frac{2}{11}}\right)$. This result gives further evidence that cartesian products which determine few distinct distances have some additive str…
Given $0<α\leqπ$, $ε>0$ and $n$, we define random graphs on the $d$-dimensional sphere by drawing $n$ i.i.d. uniform random points for the vertices, and edges $u {\sim} v$ whenever the geodesic distance between $u$ and $v$ is $ε$-close to $α$. This model generalizes distance graphs on spheres, and also random Borsuk graphs. Topological tools are known to give tight bounds for the chromatic number of Borsuk graphs. We now study the efficiency of one of these topological invariants, namely the connectivity of Lóvasz's neighborhood complex, to bound the chromatic number of this model of random gr…
In this paper we obtain a new lower bound on the Erdős distinct distances problem in the plane over prime fields. More precisely, we show that for any set $A\subset \mathbb{F}_p^2$ with $|A|\le p^{7/6}$, the number of distinct distances determined by pairs of points in $A$ satisfies $$ |Δ(A)| \gg |A|^{\frac{1}{2}+\frac{149}{4214}}.$$ Our result gives a new lower bound of $|Δ{(A)}|$ in the range $|A|\le p^{1+\frac{149}{4065}}$. The main tools we employ are the energy of a set on a paraboloid due to Rudnev and Shkredov, a point-line incidence bound given by Stevens and de Zeeuw, and a lower boun…
We introduce a reduction from the distinct distances problem in ${\mathbb R}^d$ to an incidence problem with $(d-1)$-flats in ${\mathbb R}^{2d-1}$. Deriving the conjectured bound for this incidence problem (the bound predicted by the polynomial partitioning technique) would lead to a tight bound for the distinct distances problem in ${\mathbb R}^d$. The reduction provides a large amount of information about the $(d-1)$-flats, and a framework for deriving more restrictions that these satisfy. Our reduction is based on introducing a Lie group that is a double cover of the special Euclidean group…
We study the minimum number of distinct distances between point sets on two curves in $R^3$. Assume that one curve contains $m$ points and the other $n$ points. Our main results: (a) When the curves are conic sections, we characterize all cases where the number of distances is $O(m+n)$. This includes new constructions for points on two parabolas, two ellipses, and one ellipse and one hyperbola. In all other cases, the number of distances is $Ω(\min\{m^{2/3}n^{2/3},m^2,n^2\})$. (b) When the curves are not necessarily algebraic but smooth and contained in perpendicular planes, we characterize al…
We study the structure of planar point sets that determine a small number of distinct distances. Specifically, we show that if a set P of n points determines o(n) distinct distances, then no line contains Ω(n^{7/8}) points of P and no circle contains Ω(n^{5/6}) points of P. We rely on the bipartite and partial variant of the Elekes-Sharir framework that was presented by Sharir, Sheffer, and Solymosi in \cite{SSS13}. For the case of lines we combine this framework with a theorem from additive combinatorics, and for the case of circles we combine it with some basic algebraic geometry and a recen…
Guth and Katz proved that any point set $\mathcal P$ in the plane determines $Ω(|\mathcal P|/\log|\mathcal P|)$ distinct distances. We show that when near to this lower bound, a point set $\mathcal P$ of the form $A\times A$ must satisfy $|A-A|\ll |A|^{2-1/8}$.
