Broadly speaking, in mathematics, sparsity generally refers to the property of having a relatively small number of non-zero elements or structures within a larger space or set. This concept can be applied to various mathematical objects, such as matrices, graphs, functions, and more. Sparsity is often exploited to optimize efficiency. For instance, in linear algebra, sparse matrices (matrices with a large number of zero elements) are handled differently from dense matrices, leveraging the abundance of zeros to save memory and accelerate computations. In graph theory, sparse graphs (graphs with relatively few edges) can be processed more efficiently with different algorithms.…
