We are concerned with the study of different notions of curvature on graphs. We show that if a graph has stronger inner-outer curvature growth than a model graph, then it has faster volume growth too. We also study the relationhips of volume growth with other kind of curvatures, such as the Ollivier-Ricci curvature.
Connections between continuous and discrete worlds tend to be elusive. One example is curvature. Even though there exist numerous nonequivalent definitions of graph curvature, none is known to converge in any limit to any traditional definition of curvature of a Riemannian manifold. Here we show that Ollivier curvature of random geometric graphs in any Riemannian manifold converges in the continuum limit to Ricci curvature of the underlying manifold, but only if the definition of Ollivier graph curvature is properly generalized to apply to mesoscopic graph neighborhoods. This result establishes the first rigorous link between a definition of curvature applicable to networks and a traditional definition of curvature of smooth spaces.
Let $M^n$ be a complete, open Riemannian manifold with $Ric geq 0$. In 1994, Grigori Perelman showed that there exists a constant $delta_{n}>0$, depending only on the dimension of the manifold, such that if the volume growth satisfies $alpha_M := lim_{r to infty} frac{Vol(B_p(r))}{omega_n r^n} geq 1-delta_{n}$, then $M^n$ is contractible. Here we employ the techniques of Perelman to find specific lower bounds for the volume growth, $alpha(k,n)$, depending only on $k$ and $n$, which guarantee the individual $k$-homotopy group of $M^n$ is trivial.
Curvature is a fundamental geometric characteristic of smooth spaces. In recent years different notions of curvature have been developed for combinatorial discrete objects such as graphs. However, the connections between such discrete notions of curvature and their smooth counterparts remain lurking and moot. In particular, it is not rigorously known if any notion of graph curvature converges to any traditional notion of curvature of smooth space. Here we prove that in proper settings the Ollivier-Ricci curvature of random geometric graphs in Riemannian manifolds converges to the Ricci curvature of the manifold. This is the first rigorous result linking curvature of random graphs to curvature of smooth spaces. Our results hold for different notions of graph distances, including the rescaled shortest path distance, and for different graph densities. With the scaling of the average degree, as a function of the graph size, ranging from nearly logarithmic to nearly linear.
In this paper we provide new existence results for isoperimetric sets of large volume in Riemannian manifolds with nonnegative Ricci curvature and Euclidean volume growth. We find sufficient conditions for their existence in terms of the geometry at infinity of the manifold. As a byproduct we show that isoperimetric sets of big volume always exist on manifolds with nonnegative sectional curvature and Euclidean volume growth. Our method combines an asymptotic mass decomposition result for minimizing sequences, a sharp isoperimetric inequality on nonsmooth spaces, and the concavity property of the isoperimetric profile. The latter is new in the generality of noncollapsed manifolds with Ricci curvature bounded below.
We give several Bishop-Gromov relative volume comparisons with integral Ricci curvature which improve the results in cite{PW1}. Using one of these volume comparisons, we derive an estimate for the volume entropy in terms of integral Ricci curvature which substantially improves an earlier estimate in cite{Au2} and give an application on the algebraic entropy of its fundamental group. We also extend the almost minimal volume rigidity of cite{BBCG} to integral Ricci curvature.