Friday, March 22, 2013
3:30 pm, MC 5158

Tutte Seminar Series
Combinatorics & Optimization
Winter 2013


Christoph Helmberg
Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany

Links between Spectral Properties of the Laplacian and Structural Properties of the Graph

The Laplace matrix of a graph as well as its eigenvalues and eigenvectors appear in several rather diverse areas such as graph partitioning, Euclidean embedding problems, rigidity and the analysis of mixing rates of Markov chains. Duality in semidefinite optimization allows to develop some intuition on the relation between these applications. Our main focus will be on an appealing geometric interpretation that arises when studying connections between the separator structure of the graph and eigenvectors to optimized extremal eigenvalues of the Laplacian.