Papers › Combinatorial and Hodge Laplacians: Similarity and Difference
Combinatorial and Hodge Laplacians: Similarity and Difference
Emily Ribando-Gros, Rui Wang, Jiahui Chen, Yiying Tong, Guo-Wei Wei
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
As key subjects in spectral geometry and combinatorial graph theory respectively, the (continuous) Hodge Laplacian and the combinatorial Laplacian share similarities in revealing the topological dimension and geometric shape of data and in their realization of diffusion and minimization of harmonic measures. It is believed that they also both associate with vector calculus, through the gradient, curl, and divergence, as argued in the popular usage of "Hodge Laplacians on graphs" in the literature. Nevertheless, these Laplacians are intrinsically different in their domains of definitions and applicability to specific data formats, hindering any in-depth comparison of the two approaches. To facilitate the comparison and bridge the gap between the combinatorial Laplacian and Hodge Laplacian for the discretization of continuous manifolds with boundary, we further introduce Boundary-Induced Graph (BIG) Laplacians using tools from Discrete Exterior Calculus (DEC). BIG Laplacians are defined on discrete domains with appropriate boundary conditions to characterize the topology and shape of data. The similarities and differences of the combinatorial Laplacian, BIG Laplacian, and Hodge Laplacian are then examined. Through an Eulerian representation of 3D domains as level-set functions on regular grids, we show experimentally the conditions for the convergence of BIG Laplacian eigenvalues to those of the Hodge Laplacian for elementary shapes.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections