1) Dearth 2) Spareness 3) Sparseness 1) Exiguity 2) Lacking denseness 3) Meagerness 4) Meagreness 5) Poorness 6) Scantiness 7) Scantness 8) Spareness 9) Sparseness 
The fraction of zeroes in a matrix. If A is m by n, and A(i, j) not= 0 for k of its elements, its sparsity is k/mn. Large linear programs tend to be very sparse, increasing as the dimensions get large. For example, consider the standard transportation problem with s sources and d destinations. This has m = (s+d) constraints and n = sd variables. E....