The total distance (or Wiener index) of a connected graph $G$ is the sum of all distances between unordered pairs of vertices of $G$. DeLaViña and Waller [‘Spanning trees with many leaves and average distance’, Electron. J. Combin.15(1) (2008), R33, 14 pp.] conjectured in 2008 that if $G$ has diameter $D>2$ and order $2D+1$, then the total distance of $G$ is at most the total distance of the cycle of the same order. In this note, we prove that this conjecture is true for 2-connected graphs.

Let $\def \xmlpi #1{}\def \mathsfbi #1{\boldsymbol {\mathsf {#1}}}\let \le =\leqslant \let \leq =\leqslant \let \ge =\geqslant \let \geq =\geqslant \def \Pr {\mathit {Pr}}\def \Fr {\mathit {Fr}}\def \Rey {\mathit {Re}}P(x)$ be a polynomial of degree $d$ with zeros $\alpha _1, \ldots, \alpha _d$. Stulov and Yang [‘An elementary inequality about the Mahler measure’, Involve6(4) (2013), 393–397] defined the total distance of$P$ as ${\rm td}(P)=\sum _{i=1}^{d} | | \alpha _i| -1|$. In this paper, using the method of explicit auxiliary functions, we study the spectrum of the total distance for totally positive algebraic integers and find its five smallest points. Moreover, for totally positive algebraic integers, we establish inequalities comparing the total distance with two standard measures and also the trace. We give numerical examples to show that our bounds are quite good. The polynomials involved in the auxiliary functions are found by a recursive algorithm.