A graph is 2-degenerate if every subgraph contains a vertex of degree at most 2. We show that every 2-degenerate graph can be drawn with straight lines such that the drawing decomposes into 4 plane forests. Therefore, the geometric arboricity, and hence the geometric thickness, of 2-degenerate graphs is at most 4. On the other hand, we show that there are 2-degenerate graphs that do not admit any straight-line drawing with a decomposition of the edge set into 2 plane graphs. That is, there are 2-degenerate graphs with geometric thickness, and hence geometric arboricity, at least 3. This answers two questions posed by Eppstein [Separating thickness from geometric thickness. In Towards a Theory of Geometric Graphs, vol. 342 of Contemp. Math., AMS, 2004].

Reachability, distance, and matching are some of the most fundamental graph problems that have been of particular interest in dynamic complexity theory in recent years [Samir Datta et al., 2018; Samir Datta et al., 2018; Samir Datta et al., 2020]. Reachability can be maintained with first-order update formulas, or equivalently in DynFO in general graphs with n nodes [Samir Datta et al., 2018], even under O(log(n)/log log(n)) changes per step [Samir Datta et al., 2018]. In the context of how large the number of changes can be handled, it has recently been shown [Samir Datta et al., 2020] that under a polylogarithmic number of changes, reachability is in DynFOpar in planar, bounded treewidth, and related graph classes - in fact in any graph where small non-zero circulation weights can be computed in NC. We continue this line of investigation and extend the meta-theorem for reachability to distance and bipartite maximum matching with the same bounds. These are amongst the most general classes of graphs known where we can maintain these problems deterministically without using a majority quantifier and even maintain witnesses. For the bipartite matching result, modifying the approach from [Stephen A. Fenner et al., 2016], we convert the static non-zero circulation weights to dynamic matching-isolating weights. While reachability is in DynFOar under O(log(n)/log log(n)) changes, no such bound is known for either distance or matching in any non-trivial class of graphs under non-constant changes. We show that, in the same classes of graphs as before, bipartite maximum matching is in DynFOar under O(log(n)/log log(n)) changes per step. En route to showing this we prove that the rank of a matrix can be maintained in DynFOar, also under O(log(n)/log log(n)) entry changes, improving upon the previous O(1) bound [Samir Datta et al., 2018]. This implies a similar extension for the non-uniform DynFO bound for maximum matching in general graphs and an alternate algorithm for maintaining reachability under O(log(n)/log log(n)) changes [Samir Datta et al., 2018].

A graph separator is a subset of vertices of a graph whose removal divides the graph into small components. Computing small graph separators for various classes of graphs is an important computational task. In this paper, we present a polynomial time algorithm that uses $O(g^{1/2}n^{1/2}\log n)$-space to find an $O(g^{1/2}n^{1/2})$-sized separator of a graph having $n$ vertices and embedded on a surface of genus $g$.

We show that for each single crossing graph $H$, a polynomially bounded weight function for all $H$-minor free graphs $G$ can be constructed in Logspace such that it gives nonzero weights to all the cycles in $G$. This class of graphs subsumes almost all classes of graphs for which such a weight function is known to be constructed in Logspace. As a consequence, we obtain that for the class of $H$-minor free graphs where $H$ is a single crossing graph, reachability can be solved in UL, and bipartite maximum matching can be solved in SPL, which are small subclasses of the parallel complexity class NC. In the restrictive case of bipartite graphs, our maximum matching result improves upon the recent result of Eppstein and Vazirani, where they show an NC bound for constructing perfect matching in general single crossing minor free graphs.

The problem of graph Reachability is to decide whether there is a path from one vertex to another in a given graph. In this paper, we study the Reachability problem on three distinct graph families - intersection graphs of Jordan regions, unit contact disk graphs (penny graphs), and chordal graphs. For each of these graph families, we present space-efficient algorithms for the Reachability problem. For intersection graphs of Jordan regions, we show how to obtain a "good" vertex separator in a space-efficient manner and use it to solve the Reachability in polynomial time and $O(m^{1/2}\log n)$ space, where $n$ is the number of Jordan regions, and $m$ is the total number of crossings among the regions. We use a similar approach for chordal graphs and obtain a polynomial-time and $O(m^{1/2}\log n)$ space algorithm, where $n$ and $m$ are the number of vertices and edges, respectively. However, we use a more involved technique for unit contact disk graphs (penny graphs) and obtain a better algorithm. We show that for every $ε> 0$, there exists a polynomial-time algorithm that can solve Reachability in an $n$ vertex directed penny graph, using $O(n^{1/4+ε})$ space. We note that the method used to solve penny graphs does not extend naturally to the class of geometric intersection graphs that include arbitrary size cliques.

The catalytic Turing machine is a model of computation defined by Buhrman, Cleve, Koucký, Loff, and Speelman (STOC 2014). Compared to the classical space-bounded Turing machine, this model has an extra space which is filled with arbitrary content in addition to the clean space. In such a model we study if this additional filled space can be used to increase the power of computation or not, with the condition that the initial content of this extra filled space must be restored at the end of the computation. In this paper, we define the notion of unambiguous catalytic Turing machine and prove that under a standard derandomization assumption, the class of problems solved by an unambiguous catalytic Turing machine is same as the class of problems solved by a general nondeterministic catalytic Turing machine in the logspace setting.

The reachability problem is to determine if there exists a path from one vertex to another in a graph. Grid graphs are the class of graphs where vertices are present on the lattice points of a two-dimensional grid, and an edge can occur between a vertex and its immediate horizontal or vertical neighbor only. Asano et al. presented the first simultaneous time space bound for reachability in grid graphs by presenting an algorithm that solves the problem in polynomial time and O(n^(1/2 + epsilon)) space. In 2018, the space bound was improved to O~(n^(1/3)) by Ashida and Nakagawa. In this paper, we show that reachability in an n vertex grid graph can be decided by an algorithm using O(n^(1/4 + epsilon)) space and polynomial time simultaneously.

Reachability is the problem of deciding whether there is a path from one vertex to the other in the graph. Standard graph traversal algorithms such as DFS and BFS take linear time to decide reachability; however, their space complexity is also linear. On the other hand, Savitch’s algorithm takes quasipolynomial time although the space bound is O(log^2 n). Here, we study space efficient algorithms for deciding reachability that run in polynomial time. In this paper, we show that given an n vertex directed graph of treewidth w along with its tree decomposition, there exists an algorithm running in polynomial time and O(w log n) space that solves the reachability problem.