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Kovaleva and Spieksma (SIAM J Discrete Math 20(3):48–768, 2006) considered the problem of stabbing a given set of horizontal line segments with the smallest number of horizontal and vertical lines. The standard LP relaxation for this problem is easily shown to have an integrality gap of at most 2 by treating the horizontal and vertical lines separately. However, Kovaleva and Spieksma observed that threshold rounding can be used to obtain an integrality gap of e / (e - 1) ≈ 1.58 which is also shown to be tight. This is one of the rare known examples where the obvious upper bound of 2 on the integrality gap of the standard LP relaxation can be improved. Our goal in this paper is to extend their proof to two other problems where the goal is to stab a set R of objects with horizontal and vertical lines: in the first problem R is a set of horizontal and vertical line segments, and in the second problem R is a set of unit sized squares. The proof of Kovaleva and Spieksma essentially shows the existence of an appropriate threshold which yields the improved approximation factor. We begin by showing that a random threshold picked from an appropriate distribution works. This reduces the problem to finding an appropriate distribution for a desired approximation ratio. In the first problem, we show that the required distribution can be found by solving a linear program. In the second problem, while it seems harder to find the optimal distribution, we show that using the uniform distribution an improved approximation factor can still be obtained by solving a number of linear programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Let G be a simple graph with no isolated edges. The neighbor-distinguishing edge coloring of G is a proper edge coloring of G such that any pair of adjacent vertices have different sets consisting of colors assigned on their incident edges. The neighbor-distinguishing index of G , denoted by χ a ′ (G) , is the minimum number of colors in such an edge coloring of G . In this paper, we show that if G is a connected planar graph with maximum degree Δ ≥ 14 , then Δ ≤ χ a ′ (G) ≤ Δ + 1 , and χ a ′ (G) = Δ + 1 if and only if G contains a pair of adjacent vertices of maximum degree. This improves a result in [W. Wang, D. Huang, A characterization on the adjacent vertex distinguishing index of planar graphs with large maximum degree, SIAM J. Discrete Math. 29(2015), 2412–2431], which says that every connected planar graph G with Δ ≥ 16 has Δ ≤ χ a ′ (G) ≤ Δ + 1 , and χ a ′ (G) = Δ + 1 if and only if G contains a pair of adjacent vertices of maximum degree. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A numerical semigroup S is cyclotomic if its semigroup polynomial P S is a product of cyclotomic polynomials. The number of irreducible factors of P S (with multiplicity) is the polynomial length ℓ (S) of S. We show that a cyclotomic numerical semigroup is complete intersection if ℓ (S) ≤ 2 . This establishes a particular case of a conjecture of Ciolan et al. (SIAM J Discrete Math 30(2):650–668, 2016) claiming that every cyclotomic numerical semigroup is complete intersection. In addition, we investigate the relation between ℓ (S) and the embedding dimension of S. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The crossing number of a graph G, denoted by cr(G), is defined as the smallest possible number of edge-crossings in a drawing of G in the plane. The cone CG, obtained from G by adding a new vertex adjacent to all the vertices in G. Let ϕ s (k) = min { c r (C G) - c r (G) } , where the minimum is taken over all the simple graphs G with crossing number k. Alfaro et al. (SIAM J Discrete Math, 32: 2080–2093, 2018) determined ϕ s (k) ≤ k for k ≥ 3 , and proved ϕ s (3) = 3 , ϕ s (4) = 4 and ϕ s (5) = 5 . In this work, we improve the upper bound for ϕ s (k) and our main result includes the following, slightly surprising, fact: ϕ s (6) = 5 and ϕ s (7) = 6 . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]