Graph explorer

Flips and Spanners

In this thesis, we study two different graph problems. The first problem revolves around geometric spanners. Here, we have a set of points in the plane and we want to connect them with straight line segments, such that there is a path between each pair of points that does not make a large detour. If we achieve this, the resulting graph is called a spanner. We focus our attention on $Θ$-graphs, which are constructed by connecting each point with its nearest neighbour in a fixed number of cones. Although this construction is very straight-forward, it has proven challenging to fully determine the properties of the resulting graphs. We show that if the construction uses 5 cones, the resulting graphs are still spanners. This was the only number of cones for which this question remained unanswered. We also present a routing strategy on the half-$Θ_6$-graph, a variant of the graph with 6 cones. We show that our routing strategy finds a path whose length is at most a constant factor from the straight-line distance between the endpoints. Moreover, we show that this routing strategy is optimal. In the second part, we turn our attention to flips in triangulations. A flip is a simple operation