Discrete combinatorial optimization has a central role in many scientific disciplines, however, for hard problems we lack linear time algorithms that would allow us to solve very large instances.

Two computer scientists found — in the unlikeliest of places — just the idea they needed to make a big leap in graph theory. This past October, as Jacob Holm and Eva Rotenberg were thumbing through a ...

Back in the hazy olden days of the pre-2000s, navigating between two locations generally required someone to whip out a paper map and painstakingly figure out the most optimal route between those ...

As mathematical abstractions go, graphs are among the simplest. Scatter a bunch of points in a plane. Connect some of them with lines. That’s all a graph is. And yet they are incredibly powerful. They ...

A puzzle that has long flummoxed computers and the scientists who program them has suddenly become far more manageable. A new algorithm efficiently solves the graph isomorphism problem, computer ...