David Eppstein – Publications

Publications with Martin Nöllenburg

• Lombardi drawings of graphs.
  C. Duncan, D. Eppstein, M. T. Goodrich, S. Kobourov, and M. Nöllenburg.
  Proc. 18th Int. Symp. Graph Drawing, Konstanz, Germany, 2010.
  Springer, Lecture Notes in Comp. Sci. 6502, 2011, pp. 195–207.
  arXiv:1009.0579.
  Invited talk at 7th Dutch Computational Geometry Day, Eindhoven, the Netherlands, 2010.
  J. Graph Algorithms and Applications 16 (1): 85–108, 2012 (special issue for GD 2010).

  In honor of artist Mark Lombardi, we define a Lombardi drawing to be a drawing of a graph in which the edges are drawn as circular arcs and at each vertex they are equally spaced around the vertex so as to achieve the best possible angular resolution. We describe algorithms for constructing Lombardi drawings of regular graphs, 2-degenerate graphs, graphs with rotational symmetry, and several types of planar graphs. A program for the rotationally symmetric case, the Lombardi Spirograph, is available online.

• Drawing trees with perfect angular resolution and polynomial area.
  C. Duncan, D. Eppstein, M. T. Goodrich, S. Kobourov, and M. Nöllenburg.
  Proc. 18th Int. Symp. Graph Drawing, Konstanz, Germany, 2010.
  Springer, Lecture Notes in Comp. Sci. 6502, 2011, pp. 183–194.
  arXiv:1009.0581.
  Discrete Comput. Geom. 49 (2): 157–182, 2013.

  We consider balloon drawings of trees, in which each subtree of the root is drawn recursively within a disk, and these disks are arranged radially around the root, with the edges at each node spaced equally around the node so as to achieve the best possible angular resolution. If we are allowed to permute the children of each node, then we show that a drawing of this type can be made in which all edges are straight line segments and the area of the drawing is a polynomial multiple of the shortest edge length. However, if the child ordering is prescribed, exponential area might be necessary. We show that, if we relax the requirement of straight line edges and draw the edges as circular arcs (a style we call Lombardi drawing) then even with a prescribed child ordering we can achieve polynomial area.

• Optimal 3D angular resolution for low-degree graphs.
  D. Eppstein, M. Löffler, E. Mumford, and M. Nöllenburg.
  Proc. 18th Int. Symp. Graph Drawing, Konstanz, Germany, 2010.
  Springer, Lecture Notes in Comp. Sci. 6502, 2011, pp. 208–219.
  arXiv:1009.0045.
  J. Graph Algorithms and Applications 17 (3): 173–200, 2013.

  We show how to draw any graph of maximum degree three in three dimensions with 120 degree angles at each vertex or bend, and any graph of maximum degree four in three dimensions with the angles of the diamond lattice at each vertex or bend. In each case there are no crossings and the number of bends per edge is a small constant.

• Adjacency-preserving spatial treemaps.
  K. Buchin, D. Eppstein, M. Löffler, M. Nöllenburg, and R. I. Silveira.
  arXiv:1105.0398.
  12th International Symposium on Algorithms and Data Structures (WADS 2011), New York, 2011.
  Springer, Lecture Notes in Comp. Sci. 6844, 2011, pp. 159–170.
  J. Computational Geometry 7 (1): 100–122, 2016.

  We study the recursive partitions of rectangles into sets of rectangles, and partitions of those rectangles into smaller rectangles, to form stylized visualizations of hierarchically subdivided geographic regions. There are several variations of varying difficulty depending on how much of the geographic information from the input we require the output to preserve.

• Planar and poly-arc Lombardi drawings.
  C. Duncan, D. Eppstein, M. T. Goodrich, S. Kobourov, and M. Löffler, and M. Nöllenburg.
  Proc. 19th Int. Symp. Graph Drawing, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, 2011.
  Springer, Lecture Notes in Comp. Sci. 7034, 2012, pp. 308–319.
  arXiv:1109.0345.
  J. Computational Geometry 9 (1): 328–355, 2018.

  We extend Lombardi drawing (in which each edge is a circular arc and the edges incident to a vertex must be equally spaced around it) to drawings in which edges are composed of multiple arcs, and we investigate the graphs that can be drawn in this more relaxed framework.

• Strict confluent drawing.
  D. Eppstein, D. Holten, M. Löffler, M. Nöllenburg, and B. Speckmann, and K. Verbeek.
  arXiv:1308.6824.
  21st Int. Symp. Graph Drawing, Bordeaux, France, 2013.
  Springer, Lecture Notes in Comp. Sci. 8242, 2013, pp. 352–363.
  J. Computational Geometry 7 (1): 22–46, 2016.

  A confluent drawing of a graph is a set of points and curves in the plane with the property that two vertices are adjacent in the graph if and only if the corresponding points can be connected to each other by smooth paths in the drawing. We define a variant of confluent drawing, strict confluent drawing, in which a smooth path between two vertices (if it exists) must be unique. We show that it is NP-complete to test whether such drawings exist, in contrast to unrestricted confluence for which the complexity remains open. Additionally, we show that finding outerplanar drawings (in which the points are on the boundary of a disk and the curves are interior to it) with a fixed cyclic vertex ordering can be performed in polynomial time. We use circle packings to find nice versions of these drawings in which all tracks are represented by piecewise-circular curves.

• Visualizing treewidth.
  A. Chiu, T. Depian, D. Eppstein, M. T. Goodrich, and M. Nöllenburg.
  arXiv:2508.19935.
  33rd International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization.
  Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs) 357, 2025, pp. 17:1–17:20.

  We experiment with metro-map style visualizations of tree decompositions of graphs. Here, the bags of a tree decomposition are visualized as stations on a metro system, and the vertices of a graph are visualized as metro lines passing through certain stations. Within each bag we display a drawing of the induced subgraph of the bag.