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We consider a new multivariate generalization of the classical monic (univariate) Chebyshev polynomial that minimizes the uniform norm on the interval $[-1,1]$. Let $\Pi^*_n$ be the subset of polynomials of degree at most $n$ in $d$ variables, whose homogeneous part of degree $n$ has coefficients summing up to $1$. The problem is determining a polynomial in $\Pi^*_n$ with the smallest uniform norm on a domain $\Omega$, which we call a least Chebyshev polynomial (associated with $\Omega$). Our main result solves the problem for $\Omega$ belonging to a non-trivial class of domains, defined by a property of its diagonal, and establishes the remarkable result that a least Chebyshev polynomial can be given via the classical, univariate, Chebyshev polynomial. In particular, the solution can be independent of the dimension. The result is valid for fairly general domains that can be non-convex and highly irregular.

This article is concerned with an extension of univariate Chebyshev polynomials of the first kind to the multivariate setting, where one chases best approximants to specific monomials by polynomials of lower degree relative to the uniform norm. Exploiting the Moment-SOS hierarchy, we devise a versatile semidefinite-programming-based procedure to compute such best approximants, as well as associated signatures. Applying this procedure in three variables leads to the values of best approximation errors for all mononials up to degree six on the euclidean ball, the simplex, and the cross-polytope. Furthermore, inspired by numerical experiments, we obtain explicit expressions for Chebyshev polynomials in two cases unresolved before, namely for the monomial $x_1^2 x_2^2 x_3$ on the euclidean ball and for the monomial $x_1^2 x_2 x_3$ on the simplex.

The Schm\"udgen's Positivstellensatz gives a certificate to verify positivity of a strictly positive polynomial $f$ on a compact, basic, semi-algebraic set $\mathbf{K} \subset \mathbb{R}^n$. A Positivstellensatz of this type is called effective if one may bound the degrees of the polynomials appearing in the certificate in terms of properties of $f$. If $\mathbf{K} = [-1,1]^n$ and $0 < f_\min := \min_{x \in \mathbf{K}} f(x)$, then the degrees of the polynomials appearing in the certificate may be bounded by $O\left(\sqrt{\frac{f_\max - f_\min}{f_\min}}\right)$, where $f_\max := \max_{x \in \mathbf{K}} f(x)$, as was recently shown by Laurent and Slot [Optimization Letters 17:515-530, 2023]. The big-O notation suppresses dependence on $n$ and the degree $d$ of $f$. In this paper we show a similar result, but with a better dependence on $n$ and $d$. In particular, our bounds depend on the $1$-norm of the coefficients of $f$, that may readily be calculated.

We propose an interior point method (IPM) for solving semidefinite programming problems (SDPs). The standard interior point algorithms used to solve SDPs work in the space of positive semidefinite matrices. Contrary to that the proposed algorithm works in the cone of matrices of constant \emph{factor width}. This adaptation makes the proposed method more suitable for parallelization than the standard IPM. We prove global convergence and provide a complexity analysis. Our work is inspired by a series of papers by Ahmadi, Dash, Majumdar and Hall, and builds upon a recent preprint by Roig-Solvas and Sznaier [arXiv:2202.12374, 2022]., Comment: 17 pages, 2 figures

In this paper, we study randomized and cyclic coordinate descent for convex unconstrained optimization problems. We improve the known convergence rates in some cases by using the numerical semidefinite programming performance estimation method. As a spin-off we provide a method to analyse the worst-case performance of the Gauss-Seidel iterative method for linear systems where the coefficient matrix is positive semidefinite with a positive diagonal.

In this paper, we study the gradient descent-ascent method for convex-concave saddle-point problems. We derive a new non-asymptotic global convergence rate in terms of distance to the solution set by using the semidefinite programming performance estimation method. The given convergence rate incorporates most parameters of the problem and it is exact for a large class of strongly convex-strongly concave saddle-point problems for one iteration. We also investigate the algorithm without strong convexity and we provide some necessary and sufficient conditions under which the gradient descent-ascent enjoys linear convergence.

Recently, semidefinite programming performance estimation has been employed as a strong tool for the worst-case performance analysis of first order methods. In this paper, we derive new non-ergodic convergence rates for the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) by using performance estimation. We give some examples which show the exactness of the given bounds. We also study the linear and R-linear convergence of ADMM. We establish that ADMM enjoys a global linear convergence rate if and only if the dual objective satisfies the Polyak-Lojasiewicz (PL)inequality in the presence of strong convexity. In addition, we give an explicit formula for the linear convergence rate factor. Moreover, we study the R-linear convergence of ADMM under two new scenarios.

In this paper, we derive a new linear convergence rate for the gradient method with fixed step lengths for non-convex smooth optimization problems satisfying the Polyak-Lojasiewicz (PL) inequality. We establish that the PL inequality is a necessary and sufficient condition for linear convergence to the optimal value for this class of problems. We list some related classes of functions for which the gradient method may enjoy linear convergence rate. Moreover, we investigate their relationship with the PL inequality.

In this paper we construct a hierarchy of multivariate polynomial approximation kernels via semidefinite programming. We give details on the implementation of the semidefinite programs defining the kernels. Finally, we show how a symmetry reduction may be performed to increase numerical tractability.

In this paper we consider the problem of finding bounds on the prices of options depending on multiple assets without assuming any underlying model on the price dynamics, but only the absence of arbitrage opportunities. We formulate this as a generalized moment problem and utilize the well-known Moment-Sum-of-Squares (SOS) hierarchy of Lasserre to obtain bounds on the range of the possible prices. A complementary approach (also due to Lasserre) is employed for comparison. We present several numerical examples to demonstrate the viability of our approach. The framework we consider makes it possible to incorporate different kinds of observable data, such as moment information, as well as observable prices of options on the assets of interest., Comment: 20 pages

In this paper, we study the convergence rate of the DCA (Difference-of-Convex Algorithm), also known as the convex-concave procedure, with two different termination criteria that are suitable for smooth and nonsmooth decompositions respectively. The DCA is a popular algorithm for difference-of-convex (DC) problems, and known to converge to a stationary point of the objective under some assumptions. We derive a worst-case convergence rate of $O(1/\sqrt{N})$ after $N$ iterations of the objective gradient norm for certain classes of DC problems, without assuming strong convexity in the DC decomposition, and give an example which shows the convergence rate is exact. We also provide a new convergence rate of $O(1/N)$ for the DCA with the second termination criterion. %In addition, we investigate the DCA with regularization. Moreover, we derive a new linear convergence rate result for the DCA under the assumption of the Polyak-\L ojasiewicz inequality. The novel aspect of our analysis is that it employs semidefinite programming performance estimation.

In this paper, we study the convergence rate of the gradient (or steepest descent) method with fixed step lengths for finding a stationary point of an $L$-smooth function. We establish a new convergence rate, and show that the bound may be exact in some cases, in particular when all step lengths lie in the interval $(0,1/L]$. In addition, we derive an optimal step length with respect to the new bound.

We consider the generalized moment problem (GMP) over the simplex and the sphere. This is a rich setting and it contains NP-hard problems as special cases, like constructing optimal cubature schemes and rational optimization. Using the Reformulation-Linearization Technique (RLT) and Lasserre-type hierarchies, relaxations of the problem are introduced and analyzed. For our analysis we assume throughout the existence of a dual optimal solution as well as strong duality. For the GMP over the simplex we prove a convergence rate of $O(1/r)$ for a linear programming, RLT-type hierarchy, where $r$ is the level of the hierarchy, using a quantitative version of P\'olya's Positivstellensatz. As an extension of a recent result by Fang and Fawzi [Math. Program., 2020, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10107-020-01537-7] we prove the Lasserre hierarchy of the GMP [Math. Program., Vol. 112, 65-92, 2008] over the sphere has a convergence rate of $O(1/r^2)$. Moreover, we show the introduced linear RLT-relaxation is a generalization of a hierarchy for minimizing forms of degree $d$ over the simplex, introduced by de Klerk, Laurent and Parrilo [J. Theoretical Computer Science, Vol. 361, 210-225, 2006]., Comment: 13 pages

We propose an analytic center cutting plane method to determine if a matrix is completely positive, and return a cut that separates it from the completely positive cone if not. This was stated as an open (computational) problem by Berman, D\"ur, and Shaked-Monderer [Electronic Journal of Linear Algebra, 2015]. Our method optimizes over the intersection of a ball and the copositive cone, where membership is determined by solving a mixed-integer linear program suggested by Xia, Vera, and Zuluaga [INFORMS Journal on Computing, 2018]. Thus, our algorithm can, more generally, be used to solve any copositive optimization problem, provided one knows the radius of a ball containing an optimal solution. Numerical experiments show that the number of oracle calls (matrix copositivity checks) for our implementation scales well with the matrix size, growing roughly like $O(d^2)$ for $d\times d$ matrices. The method is implemented in Julia, and available at https://github.com/rileybadenbroek/CopositiveAnalyticCenter.jl., Comment: 16 pages, 1 figure

A common computational approach for polynomial optimization problems (POPs) is to use (hierarchies of) semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations. When the variables in the POP are required to be nonnegative, these SDP problems typically involve nonnegative matrices, i.e. they are conic optimization problems over the doubly nonnegative cone. The Jordan reduction, a symmetry reduction method for conic optimization, was recently introduced for symmetric cones by Parrilo and Permenter [Mathematical Programming 181(1), 2020]. We extend this method to the doubly nonnegative cone, and investigate its application to known relaxations of the quadratic assignment and maximum stable set problems. We also introduce new Julia software where the symmetry reduction is implemented., Comment: 19 pages, titled change from earlier version. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1908.00872

We consider three known bounds for the quadratic assignment problem (QAP): an eigenvalue, a convex quadratic programming (CQP), and a semidefinite programming (SDP) bound. Since the last two bounds were not compared directly before, we prove that the SDP bound is stronger than the CQP bound. We then apply these to improve known bounds on a discrete energy minimization problem, reformulated as a QAP, which aims to minimize the potential energy between repulsive particles on a toric grid. Thus we are able to prove optimality for several configurations of particles and grid sizes, complementing earlier results by Bouman, Draisma and Van Leeuwaarden [ SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics, 27(3):1295--1312, 2013]. The semidefinite programs in question are too large to solve without pre-processing, and we use a symmetry reduction method by Parrilo and Permenter [Mathematical Programming, 181:51--84, 2020] to make computation of the SDP bounds possible.

We give a rigorous complexity analysis of the simulated annealing algorithm by Kalai and Vempala [Math of OR 31.2 (2006): 253-266] using the type of temperature update suggested by Abernethy and Hazan [arXiv 1507.02528v2, 2015]. The algorithm only assumes a membership oracle of the feasible set, and we prove that it returns a solution in polynomial time which is near-optimal with high probability. Moreover, we propose a number of modifications to improve the practical performance of this method, and present some numerical results for test problems from copositive programming.

We study the convergence rate of a hierarchy of upper bounds for polynomial minimization problems, proposed by Lasserre [SIAM J. Optim. 21(3) (2011), pp. 864-885], for the special case when the feasible set is the unit (hyper)sphere. The upper bound at level r of the hierarchy is defined as the minimal expected value of the polynomial over all probability distributions on the sphere, when the probability density function is a sum-of-squares polynomial of degree at most 2r with respect to the surface measure. We show that the exact rate of convergence is Theta(1/r^2), and explore the implications for the related rate of convergence for the generalized problem of moments on the sphere., Comment: 14 pages, 2 figures

We develop a short-step interior point method to optimize a linear function over a convex body assuming that one only knows a membership oracle for this body. The approach is based on Abernethy and Hazan's sketch of a universal interior point method using the so-called entropic barrier [arXiv 1507.02528v2, 2015]. It is well-known that the gradient and Hessian of the entropic barrier can be approximated by sampling from Boltzmann-Gibbs distributions, and the entropic barrier was shown to be self-concordant by Bubeck and Eldan [arXiv 1412.1587v3, 2015]. The analysis of our algorithm uses properties of the entropic barrier, mixing times for hit-and-run random walks by Lov\'asz and Vempala [Foundations of Computer Science, 2006], approximation quality guarantees for the mean and covariance of a log-concave distribution, and results from De Klerk, Glineur and Taylor on inexact Newton-type methods [arXiv 1709.0519, 2017]., Comment: 38 pages

The generalized problem of moments is a conic linear optimization problem over the convex cone of positive Borel measures with given support. It has a large variety of applications, including global optimization of polynomials and rational functions, options pricing in finance, constructing quadrature schemes for numerical integration, and distributionally robust optimization. A usual solution approach, due to J.B. Lasserre, is to approximate the convex cone of positive Borel measures by finite dimensional outer and inner conic approximations. We will review some results on these approximations, with a special focus on the convergence rate of the hierarchies of upper and lower bounds for the general problem of moments that are obtained from these inner and outer approximations.

In distributionally robust optimization the probability distribution of the uncertain problem parameters is itself uncertain, and a fictitious adversary, e.g., nature, chooses the worst distribution from within a known ambiguity set. A common shortcoming of most existing distributionally robust optimization models is that their ambiguity sets contain pathological discrete distribution that give nature too much freedom to inflict damage. We thus introduce a new class of ambiguity sets that contain only distributions with sum-of-squares polynomial density functions of known degrees. We show that these ambiguity sets are highly expressive as they conveniently accommodate distributional information about higher-order moments, conditional probabilities, conditional moments or marginal distributions. Exploiting the theoretical properties of a measure-based hierarchy for polynomial optimization due to Lasserre [SIAM J. Optim. 21(3) (2011), pp. 864--885], we prove that certain worst-case expectation constraints are computationally tractable under these new ambiguity sets. We showcase the practical applicability of the proposed approach in the context of a stylized portfolio optimization problem and a risk aggregation problem of an insurance company., Comment: 24 pages, 1 figure

We study the convergence rate of a hierarchy of upper bounds for polynomial optimization problems, proposed by Lasserre [SIAM J. Optim. 21(3) (2011), pp. 864-885], and a related hierarchy by De Klerk, Hess and Laurent [SIAM J. Optim. 27(1), (2017) pp. 347-367]. For polynomial optimization over the hypercube, we show a refined convergence analysis for the first hierarchy. We also show lower bounds on the convergence rate for both hierarchies on a class of examples. These lower bounds match the upper bounds and thus establish the true rate of convergence on these examples. Interestingly, these convergence rates are determined by the distribution of extremal zeroes of certain families of orthogonal polynomials., Comment: 17 pages, no figures

We provide new tools for worst-case performance analysis of the gradient (or steepest descent) method of Cauchy for smooth strongly convex functions, and Newton's method for self-concordant functions, including the case of inexact search directions. The analysis uses semidefinite programming performance estimation, as pioneered by Drori and Teboulle [Mathematical Programming, 145(1-2):451-482, 2014], and extends recent performance estimation results for the method of Cauchy by the authors [Optimization Letters, 11(7), 1185-1199, 2017]. To illustrate the applicability of the tools, we demonstrate a novel complexity analysis of short step interior point methods using inexact search directions. As an example in this framework, we sketch how to give a rigorous worst-case complexity analysis of a recent interior point method by Abernethy and Hazan [PMLR, 48:2520-2528, 2016]., Comment: 22 pages, 1 figure. Title of earlier version was "Worst-case convergence analysis of gradient and Newton methods through semidefinite programming performance estimation"

In this paper, we study polynomial norms, i.e. norms that are the $d^{\text{th}}$ root of a degree-$d$ homogeneous polynomial $f$. We first show that a necessary and sufficient condition for $f^{1/d}$ to be a norm is for $f$ to be strictly convex, or equivalently, convex and positive definite. Though not all norms come from $d^{\text{th}}$ roots of polynomials, we prove that any norm can be approximated arbitrarily well by a polynomial norm. We then investigate the computational problem of testing whether a form gives a polynomial norm. We show that this problem is strongly NP-hard already when the degree of the form is 4, but can always be answered by testing feasibility of a semidefinite program (of possibly large size). We further study the problem of optimizing over the set of polynomial norms using semidefinite programming. To do this, we introduce the notion of r-sos-convexity and extend a result of Reznick on sum of squares representation of positive definite forms to positive definite biforms. We conclude with some applications of polynomial norms to statistics and dynamical systems.

Comparison of Lasserre's measure--based bounds for polynomial optimization to bounds obtained by simulated annealing. We consider the problem of minimizing a continuous function $f$ over a compact set $\mathbf{K}$. We compare the hierarchy of upper bounds proposed by Lasserre in [{\em SIAM J. Optim.} $21(3)$ $(2011)$, pp. $864-885$] to bounds that may be obtained from simulated annealing. We show that, when $f$ is a polynomial and $\mathbf{K}$ a convex body, this comparison yields a faster rate of convergence of the Lasserre hierarchy than what was previously known in the literature., Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure

We consider the gradient (or steepest) descent method with exact line search applied to a strongly convex function with Lipschitz continuous gradient. We establish the exact worst-case rate of convergence of this scheme, and show that this worst-case behavior is exhibited by a certain convex quadratic function. We also give the tight worst-case complexity bound for a noisy variant of gradient descent method, where exact line-search is performed in a search direction that differs from negative gradient by at most a prescribed relative tolerance. The proofs are computer-assisted, and rely on the resolutions of semidefinite programming performance estimation problems as introduced in the paper [Y. Drori and M. Teboulle. Performance of first-order methods for smooth convex minimization: a novel approach. Mathematical Programming, 145(1-2):451-482, 2014]., Comment: 11pages

We consider the problem of minimizing a given $n$-variate polynomial $f$ over the hypercube $[-1,1]^n$. An idea introduced by Lasserre, is to find a probability distribution on $[-1,1]^n$ with polynomial density function $h$ (of given degree $r$) that minimizes the expectation $\int_{[-1,1]^n} f(x)h(x)d\mu(x)$, where $d\mu(x)$ is a fixed, finite Borel measure supported on $[-1,1]^n$. It is known that, for the Lebesgue measure $d\mu(x) = dx$, one may show an error bound $O(1/\sqrt{r})$ if $h$ is a sum-of-squares density, and an $O(1/r)$ error bound if $h$ is the density of a beta distribution. In this paper, we show an error bound of $O(1/r^2)$, if $d\mu(x) = \left(\prod_{i=1}^n \sqrt{1-x_i^2} \right)^{-1}dx$ (the well-known measure in the study of orthogonal polynomials), and $h$ has a Schm\"udgen-type representation with respect to $[-1,1]^n$, which is a more general condition than a sum of squares. The convergence rate analysis relies on the theory of polynomial kernels, and in particular on Jackson kernels. We also show that the resulting upper bounds may be computed as generalized eigenvalue problems, as is also the case for sum-of-squares densities., Comment: 21 pages, 3 figures, published in SIAM Journal on Optimization, 27(1):347-367, March 2017. This arXiv version is an updated version of the journal paper. Typos were corrected in the proofs of Lemmata 2.2 and 3.5 and Theorem 4.2

We consider the approximate minimization of a given polynomial on the standard simplex, obtained by taking the minimum value over all rational grid points with given denominator ${r} \in \mathbb{N}$. It was shown in [De Klerk, E., Laurent, M., Sun, Z.: An error analysis for polynomial optimization over the simplex based on the multivariate hypergeometric distribution. {\em SIAM J. Optim.} 25(3) 1498--1514 (2015)] that the relative accuracy of this approximation depends on $r$ as $O(1/r^2)$ if there exists a rational global minimizer. In this note we show that the rational minimizer condition is not necessary to obtain the $O(1/r^2)$ bound., Comment: 10 pages, 2 tables

We provide a monotone non increasing sequence of upper bounds $f^H_k$ ($k\ge 1$) converging to the global minimum of a polynomial $f$ on simple sets like the unit hypercube. The novelty with respect to the converging sequence of upper bounds in [J.B. Lasserre, A new look at nonnegativity on closed sets and polynomial optimization, SIAM J. Optim. 21, pp. 864--885, 2010] is that only elementary computations are required. For optimization over the hypercube, we show that the new bounds $f^H_k$ have a rate of convergence in $O(1/\sqrt {k})$. Moreover we show a stronger convergence rate in $O(1/k)$ for quadratic polynomials and more generally for polynomials having a rational minimizer in the hypercube. In comparison, evaluation of all rational grid points with denominator $k$ produces bounds with a rate of convergence in $O(1/k^2)$, but at the cost of $O(k^n)$ function evaluations, while the new bound $f^H_k$ needs only $O(n^k)$ elementary calculations., Comment: 24 pages, 1 figure

It is known that one can solve semidefinite programs to within fixed accuracy in polynomial time using the ellipsoid method (under some assumptions). In this paper it is shown that the same holds true when one uses the short-step, primal interior point method. The main idea of the proof is to employ Diophantine approximation at each iteration to bound the intermediate bit-sizes of iterates., Comment: (v2) some comments added, 16 pages

We consider the problem of minimizing a continuous function f over a compact set K. We analyze a hierarchy of upper bounds proposed by Lasserre in [SIAM J. Optim. 21(3) (2011), pp. 864--885], obtained by searching for an optimal probability density function h on K which is a sum of squares of polynomials, so that the expectation $\int_{K}f(x)h(x)dx$ is minimized. We show that the rate of convergence is no worse than $O(1/\sqrt{r})$, where 2r is the degree bound on the density function. This analysis applies to the case when f is Lipschitz continuous and K is a full-dimensional compact set satisfying some boundary condition (which is satisfied, e.g., for convex bodies). The r-th upper bound in the hierarchy may be computed using semidefinite programming if f is a polynomial of degree d, and if all moments of order up to 2r+d of the Lebesgue measure on K are known, which holds for example if K is a simplex, hypercube, or a Euclidean ball., Comment: 26 pages, 1 figure, 10 tables

We study the minimization of fixed-degree polynomials over the simplex. This problem is well-known to be NP-hard, as it contains the maximum stable set problem in graph theory as a special case. In this paper, we consider a rational approximation by taking the minimum over the regular grid, which consists of rational points with denominator $r$ (for given $r$). We show that the associated convergence rate is $O(1/r^2)$ for quadratic polynomials. For general polynomials, if there exists a rational global minimizer over the simplex, we show that the convergence rate is also of the order $O(1/r^2)$. Our results answer a question posed by De Klerk et al. (2013) and improves on previously known $O(1/r)$ bounds in the quadratic case., Comment: 17 pages

The problem of minimizing a polynomial over the standard simplex is one of the basic NP-hard nonlinear optimization problems --- it contains the maximum clique problem in graphs as a special case. It is known that the problem allows a polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS) for polynomials of fixed degree, which is based on polynomial evaluations at the points of a sequence of regular grids. In this paper, we provide an alternative proof of the PTAS property. The proof relies on the properties of Bernstein approximation on the simplex. We also refine a known error bound for the scheme for polynomials of degree three. The main contribution of the paper is to provide new insight into the PTAS by establishing precise links with Bernstein approximation and the multinomial distribution., Comment: 21 pages

A "book" with k pages consists of a straight line (the "spine") and k half-planes (the "pages"), such that the boundary of each page is the spine. If a graph is drawn on a book with k pages in such a way that the vertices lie on the spine, and each edge is contained in a page, the result is a k-page book drawing (or simply a k-page drawing). The pagenumber of a graph G is the minimum k such that G admits a k-page embedding (that is, a k-page drawing with no edge crossings). The k-page crossing number nu_k(G) of G is the minimum number of crossings in a k-page drawing of G. We investigate the pagenumbers and k-page crossing numbers of complete bipartite graphs. We find the exact pagenumbers of several complete bipartite graphs, and use these pagenumbers to find the exact k-page crossing number of K_{k+1,n} for 3<=k<=6. We also prove the general asymptotic estimate lim_{k->oo} lim_{n->oo} nu_k(K_{k+1,n})/(2n^2/k^2)=1. Finally, we give general upper bounds for nu_k(K_{m,n}), and relate these bounds to the k-planar crossing numbers of K_{m,n} and K_n., Comment: 22 pages, 5 figures

A "book with k pages" consists of a straight line (the "spine") and k half-planes (the "pages"), such that the boundary of each page is the spine. If a graph is drawn on a book with k pages in such a way that the vertices lie on the spine, and each edge is contained in a page, the result is a k-page book drawing (or simply a k-page drawing). The k-page crossing number nu_k(G) of a graph G is the minimum number of crossings in a k-page drawing of G. In this paper we investigate the k-page crossing numbers of complete graphs K_n. We use semidefinite programming techniques to give improved lower bounds on nu_k(K_n) for various values of k. We also use a maximum satisfiability reformulation to calculate the exact value of nu_k(K_n) for several values of k and n. Finally, we investigate the best construction known for drawing K_n in k pages, calculate the resulting number of crossings, and discuss this upper bound in the light of the new results reported in this paper., Comment: pdfLaTeX, 26 pages

It has been long conjectured that the crossing numbers of the complete bipartite graph K_{m,n} and of the complete graph K_n equal Z(m,n) (the value conjectured by Zarankiewicz, who came up with a drawing reaching this value) and Z(n) :=Z(n,n-2)/4, respectively. In a 2-page drawing of a graph, the vertices are drawn on a straight line (the spine), and each edge is contained in one of the half-planes of the spine. The 2-page crossing number v_2(G) of a graph G is the minimum number of crossings in a 2-page drawing of G. Somewhat surprisingly, there are 2-page drawings of K_{m,n} (respectively, K_n) with exactly Z(m, n) (respectively, Z(n)) crossings, thus yielding the conjectures (I) v_2(Km,n) =Z(m,n), and (II) v_2(Kn) = Z(n). It is known that (I) holds for min{m, n} <=6, and that (II) holds for n<=14. In this paper we prove that (I) holds asymptotically (that is, lim_n v_2 (K_{m,n})/Z (m, n) = 1) for m=7 and 8. We also prove (II) for 15<=n<=18 and n=20,24, and establish the asymptotic estimate lim_n v_2(K_n)/Z(n) >= 0.9253. The previous best-known lower bound involved the constant 0.8594., Comment: 20 pages (ignore pages 21 and 22 produced by the arxive.org script, with copies of pictures inserted elsewhere in the text)