Tuza conjectured that for every graph $G$, the maximum size $ν$ of a set of edge-disjoint triangles and minimum size $τ$ of a set of edges meeting all triangles satisfy $τ\leq 2ν$. We consider an edge-weighted version of this conjecture, which amounts to packing and covering triangles in multigraphs. Several known results about the original problem are shown to be true in this context, and some are improved. In particular, we answer a question of Krivelevich who proved that $τ\leq 2ν^*$ (where $ν^*$ is the fractional version of $ν$), and asked if this is tight. We prove that $τ\leq 2ν^*-\frac{1}{\sqrt{6}}\sqrt{ν^*}$ and show that this bound is essentially best possible.
A long-standing conjecture of Zsolt Tuza asserts that the triangle covering number $τ(G)$ is at most twice the triangle packing number $ν(G)$, where the triangle packing number $ν(G)$ is the maximum size of a set of edge-disjoint triangles in $G$ and the triangle covering number $τ(G)$ is the minimal size of a set of edges intersecting all triangles. In this paper, we prove that Tuza's conjecture holds in the Erdős-Rényi random graph $G(n,m)$ for all range of $m$, closing the gap in what was previously known. (Recently, this result was also independently proved by Jeff Kahn and Jinyoung Park.)…
The triangle packing number $ν(G)$ of a graph $G$ is the maximum size of a set of edge-disjoint triangles in $G$. Tuza conjectured that in any graph $G$ there exists a set of at most $2ν(G)$ edges intersecting every triangle in $G$. We show that Tuza's conjecture holds in the random graph $G=G(n,m)$, when $m \le 0.2403n^{3/2}$ or $m\ge 2.1243n^{3/2}$. This is done by analyzing a greedy algorithm for finding large triangle packings in random graphs.
It is well known that a graph with $m$ edges can be made triangle-free by removing (slightly less than) $m/2$ edges. On the other hand, there are many classes of graphs which are hard to make triangle-free in the sense that it is necessary to remove roughly $m/2$ edges in order to eliminate all triangles. It is proved that dense graphs that are hard to make triangle-free, have a large packing of pairwise edge-disjoint triangles. In particular, they have more than $m(1/4+cβ^2)$ pairwise edge-disjoint triangles where $β$ is the density of the graph and $c$ is an absolute constant. This improves …
Parallel packing a square with isosceles right triangles and equilateral triangles
College of Mathematical Sciences, Tianjin Normal University（天津师范大学数学科学学院）；Institute of Mathematics and Interdisciplinary Sciences, Tianjin Normal University（天津师范大学数学与交叉科学研究院）
In this paper the fine triangle intersection problem for a pair of maximum kite packings is investigated. Let $Fin(v)={(s,t):$ $\exists$ a pair of maximum kite packings of order $v$ intersecting in $s$ blocks and $s+t$ triangles$}$. Let $Adm(v)={(s,t): s+t\leq b_v, s,t$ are non-negative integers$}$, where $b_v=\lfloor v(v-1)/8\rfloor$. It is established that $Fin(v)= Adm(v)\setminus {(b_v-1,0),(b_v-1,1)}$ for any integer $v\equiv 0,1 ({\rm mod} 8)$ and $v\geq 8$; $Fin(v)=Adm(v)$ for any integer $v\equiv 2,3,4,5,6,7 ({\rm mod} 8)$ and $v\geq 4$.
We prove that if a directed multigraph $D$ has at most $t$ pairwise arc-disjoint directed triangles, then there exists a set of less than $2t$ arcs in $D$ which meets all directed triangles in $D$, except in the trivial case $t=0$. This answers affirmatively a question of Tuza from 1990.
We prove that in every $2$-edge-colouring of $K_n$ there is a collection of $n^2/12 + o(n^2)$ edge-disjoint monochromatic triangles, thus confirming a conjecture of Erdős. We also prove a corresponding stability result, showing that $2$-colourings that are close to attaining the aforementioned bound have a colour class which is close to bipartite. As part of our proof, we confirm a recent conjecture of Tyomkyn about the fractional version of this problem.
We show that there exist efficient algorithms for the triangle packing problem in colored permutation graphs, complete multipartite graphs, distance-hereditary graphs, k-modular permutation graphs and complements of k-partite graphs (when k is fixed). We show that there is an efficient algorithm for C_4-packing on bipartite permutation graphs and we show that C_4-packing on bipartite graphs is NP-complete. We characterize the cobipartite graphs that have a triangle partition.
A well-known conjecture of Tuza asserts that if a graph has at most $t$ pairwise edge-disjoint triangles, then it can be made triangle-free by removing at most $2t$ edges. If true, the factor 2 would be best possible. In the directed setting, also asked by Tuza, the analogous statement has recently been proven, however, the factor 2 is not optimal. In this paper, we show that if an $n$-vertex directed graph has at most $t$ pairwise arc-disjoint directed triangles, then there exists a set of at most $1.8t+o(n^2)$ arcs that meets all directed triangles. We complement our result by presenting two…
An oriented graph is a directed graph which can be obtained from a simple undirected graph by orienting its edges. In this paper we show that any oriented graph G on n vertices with minimum indegree and outdegree at least (1/2-o(1))n contains a packing of cyclic triangles covering all but at most 3 vertices. This almost answers a question of Cuckler and Yuster and is best possible, since for n = 3 mod 18 there is a tournament with no perfect triangle packing and with all indegrees and outdegrees (n-1)/2 or (n-1)/2 \pm 1. Under the same hypotheses, we also show that one can embed any prescribed…
Given a simple graph $G=(V,E)$, a subset of $E$ is called a triangle cover if it intersects each triangle of $G$. Let $ν_t(G)$ and $τ_t(G)$ denote the maximum number of pairwise edge-disjoint triangles in $G$ and the minimum cardinality of a triangle cover of $G$, respectively. Tuza conjectured in 1981 that $τ_t(G)/ν_t(G)\le2$ holds for every graph $G$. In this paper, using a hypergraph approach, we design polynomial-time combinatorial algorithms for finding small triangle covers. These algorithms imply new sufficient conditions for Tuza's conjecture on covering and packing triangles. More pre…
The random greedy algorithm for constructing a large partial Steiner-Triple-System is defined as follows. We begin with a complete graph on $n$ vertices and proceed to remove the edges of triangles one at a time, where each triangle removed is chosen uniformly at random from the collection of all remaining triangles. This stochastic process terminates once it arrives at a triangle-free graph. In this note we show that with high probability the number of edges in the final graph is at most $ O\big( n^{7/4}\log^{5/4}n \big) $.
Given a graph $G$ and a nondecreasing sequence $S=(s_1,\ldots,s_k)$ of positive integers, the mapping $c:V(G)\longrightarrow \{1,\ldots,k\}$ is called an $S$-packing coloring of $G$ if for any two distinct vertices $x$ and $y$ in $c^{-1}(i)$, the distance between $x$ and $y$ is greater than $s_i$. The smallest integer $k$ such that there exists a $(1,2,\ldots,k)$-packing coloring of a graph $G$ is called the packing chromatic number of $G$, denoted $χ_ρ(G)$. The question of boundedness of the packing chromatic number in the class of subcubic (planar) graphs was investigated in several earlier …
Previously published packings of equal disks in an equilateral triangle have dealt with up to 21 disks. We use a new discrete-event simulation algorithm to produce packings for up to 34 disks. For each n in the range 22 =< n =< 34 we present what we believe to be the densest possible packing of n equal disks in an equilateral triangle. For these n we also list the second, often the third and sometimes the fourth best packings among those that we found. In each case, the structure of the packing implies that the minimum distance d(n) between disk centers is the root of polynomial P_n with integ…
In this paper, we investigate the packing parameters in graphs. By applying the Mantel's theorem, We give upper bounds on packing and open packing numbers of triangle-free graphs along with characterizing the graphs for which the equalities hold and exhibit sharp Nordhaus-Gaddum type inequalities for packing numbers. We also solve the open problem of characterizing all connected graphs with $ρ_{o}(G)=n-ω(G)$ posed in [S. Hamid and S. Saravanakumar, {\em Packing parameters in graphs}, Discuss Math. Graph Theory, 35 (2015), 5--16].
Motivated by problems involving triangle-decompositions of graphs, we examine the facet structure of the cone $τ_n$ of weighted graphs on $n$ vertices generated by triangles. Our results include enumeration of facets for small $n$, a construction producing facets of $τ_{n+1}$ from facets of $τ_n$, and an arithmetic condition on entries of the normal vectors. We also point out that a copy of $τ_n$ essentially appears via the perimeter inequalities at one vertex of the metric polytope.
The random greedy algorithm for constructing a large partial Steiner-Triple-System is defined as follows. Begin with a complete graph on $n$ vertices and proceed to remove the edges of triangles one at a time, where each triangle removed is chosen uniformly at random out of all remaining triangles. This stochastic process terminates once it arrives at a triangle-free graph, and a longstanding open problem is to estimate the final number of edges, or equivalently the time it takes the process to conclude. The intuition that the edge distribution is roughly uniform at all times led to a folklore…
The triangle graph of a graph $G$, denoted by ${\cal T}(G)$, is the graph whose vertices represent the triangles ($K_3$ subgraphs) of $G$, and two vertices of ${\cal T}(G)$ are adjacent if and only if the corresponding triangles share an edge. In this paper, we characterize graphs whose triangle graph is a cycle and then extend the result to obtain a characterization of $C_n$-free triangle graphs. As a consequence, we give a forbidden subgraph characterization of graphs $G$ for which ${\cal T}(G)$ is a tree, a chordal graph, or a perfect graph. For the class of graphs whose triangle graph is p…
The packing chromatic number $χ_ρ(G)$ of a graph $G$ is the smallest integer $k$ such that the vertex set of $G$ can be partitioned into sets $V_i$, $i\in \{1,\ldots,k\}$, where each $V_i$ is an $i$-packing. In this paper, we consider the packing chromatic number of several families of Sierpiński-type graphs. While it is known that this number is bounded from above by $8$ in the family of Sierpiński graphs with base $3$, we prove that it is unbounded in the families of Sierpiński graphs with bases greater than $3$. On the other hand, we prove that the packing chromatic number in the family of …
A compact packing is a set of non-overlapping discs where all the holes between discs are curvilinear triangles. There is only one compact packing by discs of size $1$. There are exactly $9$ values of $r$ which allow a compact packing by discs of sizes $1$ and $r$. We prove here that there are exactly $164$ pairs $(r,s)$ allowing a compact packing by discs of sizes $1$, $r$ and $s$.
The triangle removal lemma states that a simple graph with o(n^3) triangles can be made triangle-free by removing o(n^2) edges. It is natural to ask if this widely used result can be extended to multi-graphs (or equivalently, weighted graphs). In this short paper we rule out the possibility of such an extension by showing that there are multi-graphs with only n^{2+o(1)} triangles that are still far from being triangle-free. On the other hand, we show that for some g(n)=ω(1), if a multi-graph (or weighted graph) has only g(n)n^2 triangles then it must be close to being triangle-free. The proof …
The weighted projection of an alternating sign matrix (ASM) was introduced by Brualdi and Dahl (2018) as a step towards characterising a generalisation of Latin squares they introduced using alternating sign hypermatrices. If $z_n = (n,\dots,2,1)$, then the weighted projection of an ASM $A$ is equal to $z_n^TA$. Brualdi and Dahl proved that the weighted projection of an $n \times n$ ASM is majorized by the vector $z_n$, and conjectured that any positive integer vector majorized by $z_n$ is the weighted projection of some ASM. The main result of this paper presents a proof of this conjecture, v…
We conjecture that every oriented graph $G$ on $n$ vertices with $δ^+ (G) , δ^- (G) \geq 5n/12$ contains the square of a Hamilton cycle. We also give a conjectural bound on the minimum semidegree which ensures a perfect packing of transitive triangles in an oriented graph. A link between Ramsey numbers and perfect packings of transitive tournaments is also considered.
We determine the minimal density of triangles in a tripartite graph with prescribed edge densities. This extends a previous result of Bondy, Shen, Thomassé and Thomassen characterizing those edge densities guaranteeing the existence of a triangle in a tripartite graph. To be precise we show that a suitably weighted copy of the graph formed by deleting a certain 9-cycle from $K_{3,3,3}$ has minimal triangle density among all weighted tripartite graphs with prescribed edge densities.
The weighted $\mathcal{T}$-free $2$-matching problem is the following problem: given an undirected graph $G$, a weight function on its edge set, and a set $\mathcal{T}$ of triangles in $G$, find a maximum weight $2$-matching containing no triangle in $\mathcal{T}$. When $\mathcal{T}$ is the set of all triangles in $G$, this problem is known as the weighted triangle-free $2$-matching problem, which is a long-standing open problem. A main contribution of this paper is to give a first polynomial-time algorithm for the weighted $\mathcal{T}$-free $2$-matching problem under the assumption that $\ma…
In this paper we extend a classical theorem of Corrádi and Hajnal into the setting of sparse random graphs. We show that if $p(n) \gg (\log n / n)^{1/2}$, then asymptotically almost surely every subgraph of $G(n,p)$ with minimum degree at least $(2/3 + o(1))np$ contains a triangle packing that covers all but at most $O(p^{-2})$ vertices. Moreover, the assumption on $p$ is optimal up to the $(\log n)^{1/2}$ factor and the presence of the set of $O(p^{-2})$ uncovered vertices is indispensable. The main ingredient in the proof, which might be of independent interest, is an embedding theorem which…
A set of geometric graphs is {\em geometric-packable} if it can be asymptotically packed into every sequence of drawings of the complete graph $K_n$. For example, the set of geometric triangles is geometric-packable due to the existence of Steiner Triple Systems. When $G$ is the $4$-cycle (or $4$-cycle with a chord), we show that the set of plane drawings of $G$ is geometric-packable. In contrast, the analogous statement is false when $G$ is nearly any other planar Hamiltonian graph (with at most 3 possible exceptions). A convex geometric graph is {\em convex-packable} if it can be asymptotica…
We say that a (di)graph $G$ has a perfect $H$-packing if there exists a set of vertex-disjoint copies of $H$ which cover all the vertices in $G$. The seminal Hajnal--Szemerédi theorem characterises the minimum degree that ensures a graph $G$ contains a perfect $K_r$-packing. In this paper we prove the following analogue for directed graphs: Suppose that $T$ is a tournament on $r$ vertices and $G$ is a digraph of sufficiently large order $n$ where $r$ divides $n$. If $G$ has minimum in- and outdegree at least $ (1-1/r)n$ then $G$ contains a perfect $T$-packing. In the case when $T$ is a cyclic …
For each of the notions of hypergraph quasirandomness that have been studied, we identify a large class of hypergraphs F so that every quasirandom hypergraph H admits a perfect F-packing. An informal statement of a special case of our general result for 3-uniform hypergraphs is as follows. Fix an integer r >= 4 and 0<p<1. Suppose that H is an n-vertex triple system with r|n and the following two properties: * for every graph G with V(G)=V(H), at least p proportion of the triangles in G are also edges of H, * for every vertex x of H, the link graph of x is a quasirandom graph with density at le…
Proctor proved a formula for the number of lozenge tilings of a hexagon with side-lengths $a,b,c,a,b,c$ after removing a "maximal staircase." Ciucu then presented a weighted version of Proctor's result. Here we present weighted and unweighted formulas for a similar region which has an additional unit triangle removed. We use Kuo's graphical condensation method to prove the results. By applying the factorization theorem of Ciucu, we obtain a formula for the number of lozenge tilings of a hexagon with three holes on consecutive edges.
In this work, we establish an analogue result of the Erdös-Stone theorem of weighted digraphs using Regularity Lemma of digraphs. We give a stability result of oriented graphs and digraphs with forbidden blow-up transitive triangle and show that almost all oriented graphs and almost all digraphs with forbidden blow-up transitive triangle are almost bipartite respectively.
Take a graph $G$, an edge subset $Σ\subseteq E(G)$, and a set of terminals $T\subseteq V(G)$ where $|T|$ is even. The triple $(G,Σ,T)$ is called a signed graft. A $T$-join is odd if it contains an odd number of edges from $Σ$. Let $ν$ be the maximum number of edge-disjoint odd $T$-joins. A signature is a set of the form $Σ\triangle δ(U)$ where $U\subseteq V(G)$ and $|U\cap T)$ is even. Let $τ$ be the minimum cardinality a $T$-cut or a signature can achieve. Then $ν\leq τ$ and we say that $(G,Σ,T)$ packs if equality holds here. We prove that $(G,Σ,T)$ packs if the signed graft is Eulerian and i…
In 1995 Kim famously proved the Ramsey bound R(3,t) \ge c t^2/\log t by constructing an n-vertex graph that is triangle-free and has independence number at most C \sqrt{n \log n}. We extend this celebrated result, which is best possible up to the value of the constants, by approximately decomposing the complete graph K_n into a packing of such nearly optimal Ramsey R(3,t) graphs. More precisely, for any ε>0 we find an edge-disjoint collection (G_i)_i of n-vertex graphs G_i \subseteq K_n such that (a) each G_i is triangle-free and has independence number at most C_ε\sqrt{n \log n}, and (b) the …
We study when a given edge of a factor-critical graph is contained in a matching avoiding exactly one, pregiven vertex of the graph. We then apply the results to always partition the vertex-set of a $3$-regular, $3$-uniform hypergraph into at most one triangle (hyperedge of size $3$) and edges (subsets of size $2$ of hyperedges), corresponding to the intuition, and providing new insight to triangle and edge packings of Cornuéjols' and Pulleyblank's. The existence of such a packing can be considered to be a hypergraph variant of Petersen's theorem on perfect matchings, and leads to a simple pro…
An L-factor of a graph G is a spanning subgraph of G whose every component is a 3-vertex path. Let v(G) denote the number of vertices of G. A graph is called claw-free if it does not have a subgraph isomorphic to the graph with 4 vertices and 3 edges having a common vertex. Our results include the following. Let G$ be a 3-connected claw-free graph, x be a vertex, e = xy be an edge, and P be a 3-vertex path in G. Then (c1) if v(G) = 0 mod 3, then G has an L-factor containing (avoiding) e, (c2) if v(G) = 1 mod 3, then G - x has a L-factor, (c3) if v(G) = 2 mod 3, then G - x -y has an L-factor, (…
A $ B_h $ set (or Sidon set of order $ h $) in an Abelian group $ G $ is any subset $ \{b_0, b_1, \ldots,b_{n}\} $ of $ G $ with the property that all the sums $ b_{i_1} + \cdots + b_{i_h} $ are different up to the order of the summands. Let $ ϕ(h,n) $ denote the order of the smallest Abelian group containing a $ B_h $ set of cardinality $ n + 1 $. It is shown that \[ \lim_{h \to \infty} \frac{ ϕ(h,n) }{ h^n } = \frac{1}{n! δ_L(\triangle^n)} , \] where $ δ_L(\triangle^n) $ is the lattice packing density of an $ n $-simplex in Euclidean space. This determines the asymptotics exactly in cases wh…
We prove that every 3-coloring of the edges of the complete graph on n vertices without a rainbow triangle contains a set of order Omega(n^{1/3}log^2 n) which uses at most two colors, and this bound is tight up to a constant factor. This verifies a conjecture of Hajnal which is a case of the multicolor generalization of the well-known Erdős-Hajnal conjecture. We further establish a generalization of this result. For fixed positive integers s and r with s at most r, we determine a constant c_{r,s} such that the following holds. Every r-coloring of the edges of the complete graph on n vertices w…
In recent years, Alexandersson and others proved combinatorial formulas for the Schur function expansion of the horizontal-strip LLT polynomial $G_λ(x;q)$ in some special cases. We associate a weighted graph $Π$ to $λ$ and we use it to express a linear relation among LLT polynomials. We apply this relation to prove an explicit combinatorial Schur-positive expansion of $G_λ(x;q)$ whenever $Π$ is triangle-free. We also prove that the largest power of $q$ in the LLT polynomial is the total edge weight of our graph.
An old conjecture of Zs. Tuza says that for any graph $G$, the ratio of the minimum size, $τ_3(G)$, of a set of edges meeting all triangles to the maximum size, $ν_3(G)$, of an edge-disjoint triangle packing is at most 2. Here, disproving a conjecture of R. Yuster, we show that for any fixed, positive $α$ there are arbitrarily large graphs $G$ of positive density satisfying $τ_3(G)>(1-o(1))|G|/2$ and $ν_3(G)<(1+α)|G|/4$.
We study the following family of problems: Given a set of $n$ points in convex position, what is the maximum number triangles one can create having these points as vertices while avoiding certain sets of forbidden configurations. As forbidden configurations we consider all 8 ways in which a pair of triangles in such a point set can interact. This leads to 256 extremal Turán-type questions. We give nearly tight (within a $\log n$ factor) bounds for 248 of these questions and show that the remaining 8 questions are all asymptotically equivalent to Stein's longstanding tripod packing problem.
Set packing is a fundamental problem that generalises some well-known combinatorial optimization problems and knows a lot of applications. It is equivalent to hypergraph matching and it is strongly related to the maximum independent set problem. In this thesis we study the k-set packing problem where given a universe U and a collection C of subsets over U, each of cardinality k, one needs to find the maximum collection of mutually disjoint subsets. Local search techniques have proved to be successful in the search for approximation algorithms, both for the unweighted and the weighted version o…
An L-factor of a graph G is a spanning subgraph of G whose every component is a 3-vertex path. Let v(G) be the number of vertices of G and d(G) the domination number of G. A claw is a graph with four vertices and three edges incident to the same vertex. A graph is claw-free if it has no induced subgraph isomorphic to a claw. Our results include the following. Let G be a 3-connected claw-free graph, x a vertex in G, e = xy an edge in G, and P a 3-vertex path in G. Then (a1) if v(G) = 0 mod 3, then G has an L-factor containing (avoiding) e, (a2) if v(G) = 1 mod 3, then G - x has an L-factor, (a3…
We study a new set of duality relations between weighted, combinatoric invariants of a graph $G$. The dualities arise from a non-linear transform $\mathfrak{B}$, acting on the weight function $p$. We define $\mathfrak{B}$ on a space of real-valued functions $\mathcal{O}$ and investigate its properties. We show that three invariants (weighted independence number, weighted Lovász number, and weighted fractional packing number) are fixed points of $\mathfrak{B}^{2}$, but the weighted Shannon capacity is not. We interpret these invariants in the study of quantum non-locality.
In this paper, we study a primal and dual relationship about triangles: For any graph $G$, let $ν(G)$ be the maximum number of edge-disjoint triangles in $G$, and $τ(G)$ be the minimum subset $F$ of edges such that $G \setminus F$ is triangle-free. It is easy to see that $ν(G) \leq τ(G) \leq 3 ν(G)$, and in fact, this rather obvious inequality holds for a much more general primal-dual relation between $k$-hyper matching and covering in hypergraphs. Tuza conjectured in $1981$ that $τ(G) \leq 2 ν(G)$, and this question has received attention from various groups of researchers in discrete mathema…
