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The space of persistence diagrams under bottleneck distance is known to have infinite doubling dimension. Because many metric search algorithms and data structures have bounds that depend on the dimension of the search space, the high-dimensionality makes it difficult to analyze and compare asymptotic running times of metric search algorithms on this space. We introduce the notion of nearly-doubling metrics, those that are Gromov-Hausdorff close to metric spaces of bounded doubling dimension and prove that bounded $k$-point persistence diagrams are nearly-doubling. This allows us to prove that in some ways, persistence diagrams can be expected to behave like a doubling metric space. We prove our results in great generality, studying a large class of quotient metrics (of which the persistence plane is just one example). We also prove bounds on the dimension of the $k$-point bottleneck space over such metrics. The notion of being nearly-doubling in this Gromov-Hausdorff sense is likely of more general interest. Some algorithms that have a dependence on the dimension can be analyzed in terms of the dimension of the nearby metric rather than that of the metric itself. We give a specific example of this phenomenon by analyzing an algorithm to compute metric nets, a useful operation on persistence diagrams. 

A knot is a circle piecewise-linearly embedded into the 3-sphere. The topology of a knot is intimately related to that of its exterior, which is the complement of an open regular neighborhood of the knot. Knots are typically encoded by planar diagrams, whereas their exteriors, which are compact 3-manifolds with torus boundary, are encoded by triangulations. Here, we give the first practical algorithm for finding a diagram of a knot given a triangulation of its exterior. Our method applies to links as well as knots, allows us to recover links with hundreds of crossings. We use it to find the first diagrams known for 23 principal congruence arithmetic link exteriors; the largest has over 2,500 crossings. Other applications include finding pairs of knots with the same 0-surgery, which relates to questions about slice knots and the smooth 4D Poincaré conjecture. 

We consider the following surveillance problem: Given a set P of n sites in a metric space and a set R of k robots with the same maximum speed, compute a patrol schedule of minimum latency for the robots. Here a patrol schedule specifies for each robot an infinite sequence of sites to visit (in the given order) and the latency L of a schedule is the maximum latency of any site, where the latency of a site s is the supremum of the lengths of the time intervals between consecutive visits to s. When k = 1 the problem is equivalent to the travelling salesman problem (TSP) and thus it is NP-hard. For k ≥ 2 (which is the version we are interested in) the problem becomes even more challenging; for example, it is not even clear if the decision version of the problem is decidable, in particular in the Euclidean case. We have two main results. We consider cyclic solutions in which the set of sites must be partitioned into 𝓁 groups, for some 𝓁 ≤ k, and each group is assigned a subset of the robots that move along the travelling salesman tour of the group at equal distance from each other. Our first main result is that approximating the optimal latency of the class of cyclic solutions can be reduced to approximating the optimal travelling salesman tour on some input, with only a 1+ε factor loss in the approximation factor and an O((k/ε) ^k) factor loss in the runtime, for any ε > 0. Our second main result shows that an optimal cyclic solution is a 2(1-1/k)-approximation of the overall optimal solution. Note that for k = 2 this implies that an optimal cyclic solution is optimal overall. We conjecture that this is true for k ≥ 3 as well. The results have a number of consequences. For the Euclidean version of the problem, for instance, combining our results with known results on Euclidean TSP, yields a PTAS for approximating an optimal cyclic solution, and it yields a (2(1-1/k)+ε)-approximation of the optimal unrestricted (not necessarily cyclic) solution. If the conjecture mentioned above is true, then our algorithm is actually a PTAS for the general problem in the Euclidean setting. Similar results can be obtained by combining our results with other known TSP algorithms in non-Euclidean metrics.