For undirected graphs it has been known for some time that one can bound the diameter using the eigenvalues. In this note we give a similar result for the diameter of strongly connected directed graphs G, namely D(G) 2 maxx log(1/(x)) log 2 2+ 1 where is the first non-trivial eigenvalue of the Laplacian and is the Perron vector of the transition probability matrix of a random walk on G.
Fan R. K. Chung