The Kruskal-Katona theorem together with a theorem of Razborov determine the closure of the set of points defined by the homomorphism density of the edge and the triangle in finite graphs. The boundary of this region is a countable union of algebraic curves, and in particular, it is almost everywhere differentiable. One can more generally consider the region defined by the homomorphism densities of a list of given graphs, and ask whether the boundary is as well-behaved as in the case of the triangle and the edge. Towards answering this question in the negative, we construct examples which show that the restrictions of the boundary to certain hyperplanes can have nowhere differentiable parts.
Many problems and conjectures in extremal combinatorics concern polynomial inequalities between homomorphism densities of graphs where we allow edges to have real weights. Using the theory of graph limits, we can equivalently evaluate polynomial expressions in homomorphism densities on kernels $W$, i.e., symmetric, bounded, and measurable functions $W$ from $[0,1]^2 \to \mathbb{R}$. In 2011, Hatami and Norin proved a fundamental result that it is undecidable to determine the validity of polynomial inequalities in homomorphism densities for graphons (i.e., the case where the range of $W$ is $[0…
Subgraph densities have been defined, and served as basic tools, both in the case of graphons (limits of dense graph sequences) and graphings (limits of bounded-degree graph sequences). While limit objects have been described for the "middle ranges", the notion of subgraph densities in these limit objects remains elusive. We define subgraph densities in the orthogonality graphs on the unit spheres in dimension $d$, under appropriate sparsity condition on the subgraphs. These orthogonality graphs exhibit the main difficulties of defining subgraphs the "middle" range, and so we expect their stud…
We introduce the tree distance, a new distance measure on graphs. The tree distance can be computed in polynomial time with standard methods from convex optimization. It is based on the notion of fractional isomorphism, a characterization based on a natural system of linear equations whose integer solutions correspond to graph isomorphism. By results of Tinhofer (1986, 1991) and Dvořák (2010), two graphs G and H are fractionally isomorphic if and only if, for every tree T, the number of homomorphisms from T to G equals the corresponding number from T to H, which means that the tree distance of…
The purpose of this article is to show that even the most elementary problems in asymptotic extremal graph theory can be highly non-trivial. We study linear inequalities between graph homomorphism densities. In the language of quantum graphs the validity of such an inequality is equivalent to the positivity of a corresponding quantum graph. Similar to the setting of polynomials, a quantum graph that can be represented as a sum of squares of labeled quantum graphs is necessarily positive. Lovász asks whether the opposite is also true. We answer this question and also a related question of Razbo…
In this paper we introduce the class of ordered homomorphism ideals and prove that these ideals admit minimal cellular resolutions constructed as homomorphism complexes. As a key ingredient of our work, we introduce the class of cointerval simplicial complexes and investigate their combinatorial and topological properties. As a concrete illustration of these structural results, we introduce and study nonnesting monomial ideals, an interesting family of combinatorially defined ideals.
Recently, the theory of dense graph limits has received attention from multiple disciplines including graph theory, computer science, statistical physics, probability, statistics, and group theory. In this paper we initiate the study of the general structure of differentiable graphon parameters $F$. We derive consistency conditions among the higher Gâteaux derivatives of $F$ when restricted to the subspace of edge weighted graphs $\mathcal{W}_{\bf p}$. Surprisingly, these constraints are rigid enough to imply that the multilinear functionals $Λ: \mathcal{W}_{\bf p}^n \to \mathbb{R}$ satisfying…
We initiate a study of the homomorphism domination exponent of a pair of graphs F and G, defined as the maximum real number c such that |Hom(F,T)| \geq |Hom(G,T)|^c for every graph T. The problem of determining whether HDE(F,G) \geq 1 is known as the homomorphism domination problem and its decidability is an important open question arising in the theory of relational databases. We investigate the combinatorial and computational properties of the homomorphism domination exponent, proving upper and lower bounds and isolating classes of graphs F and G for which HDE(F,G) is computable. In particul…
We consider constrained variants of graph homomorphisms such as embeddings, monomorphisms, full homomorphisms, surjective homomorpshims, and locally constrained homomorphisms. We also introduce a new variation on this theme which derives from relations between graphs and is related to multihomomorphisms. This gives a generalization of surjective homomorphisms and naturally leads to notions of R-retractions, R-cores, and R-cocores of graphs. Both R-cores and R-cocores of graphs are unique up to isomorphism and can be computed in polynomial time. The theory of the graph homomorphism order is wel…
In Chapter 1 we fully characterise pairs of finite graphs which form a gap in the full homomorphism order. This leads to a simple proof of the existence of generalised duality pairs. We also discuss how such results can be carried to relational structures with unary and binary relations. In Chapter 2 we show a very simple and versatile argument based on divisibility which immediately yields the universality of the homomorphism order of directed graphs and discuss three applications. In chapter 3, we show that every interval in the homomorphism order of finite undirected graphs is either univer…
In this paper, we introduce a broad family of group homomorphisms that we name the Gauss-Epple homomorphisms. In the setting of braid groups, the Gauss-Epple invariant was originally defined by Epple based on a note of Gauss as an action of the braid group $B_n$ on the set $\{1, \dots, n\}\times\mathbb{Z}$; we prove that it is well-defined. We consider the associated group homomorphism from $B_n$ to the symmetric group $\text{Sym}(\{1, \dots, n\}\times\mathbb{Z})$. We prove that this homomorphism factors through $\mathbb{Z}^n\rtimes S_n$ (in fact, its image is an order 2 subgroup of the previo…
In this paper we study the existence of homomorphisms $G\to H$ using semidefinite programming. Specifically, we use the vector chromatic number of a graph, defined as the smallest real number $t \ge 2$ for which there exists an assignment of unit vectors $i\mapsto p_i$ to its vertices such that $\langle p_i, p_j\rangle\le -1/(t-1),$ when $i\sim j$. Our approach allows to reprove, without using the Erdős-Ko-Rado Theorem, that for $n>2r$ the Kneser graph $K_{n:r}$ and the $q$-Kneser graph $qK_{n:r}$ are cores, and furthermore, that for $n/r = n'/r'$ there exists a homomorphism $K_{n:r}\to K_{n':…
We develop a theory of graph algebras over general fields. This is modeled after the theory developed by Freedman, Lovász and Schrijver in [22] for connection matrices, in the study of graph homomorphism functions over real edge weight and positive vertex weight. We introduce connection tensors for graph properties. This notion naturally generalizes the concept of connection matrices. It is shown that counting perfect matchings, and a host of other graph properties naturally defined as Holant problems (edge models), cannot be expressed by graph homomorphism functions with both complex vertex a…
In combinatorial commutative algebra and algebraic statistics many toric ideals are constructed from graphs. Keeping the categorical structure of graphs in mind we give previous results a more functorial context and generalize them by introducing the ideals of graph homomorphisms. For this new class of ideals we investigate how the topology of the graphs influence the algebraic properties. We describe explicit Grobner bases for several classes, generalizing results by Hibi, Sturmfels and Sullivant. One of our main tools is the toric fiber product, and we employ results by Engstrom, Kahle and S…
A $k$-edge-colored graph is a finite, simple graph with edges labeled by numbers $1,\ldots,k$. A function from the vertex set of one $k$-edge-colored graph to another is a homomorphism if the endpoints of any edge are mapped to two different vertices connected by an edge of the same color. Given a class $\mathcal{F}$ of graphs, a $k$-edge-colored graph $\mathbb{H}$ (not necessarily with the underlying graph in $\mathcal{F}$) is $k$-universal for $\mathcal{F}$ when any $k$-edge-colored graph with the underlying graph in $\mathcal{F}$ admits a homomorphism to $\mathbb{H}$. We characterize graph …
In this paper we study several problems concerning the number of homomorphisms of trees. We give an algorithm for the number of homomorphisms from a tree to any graph by the Transfer-matrix method. By using this algorithm and some transformations on trees, we study various extremal problems about the number of homomorphisms of trees. These applications include a far reaching generalization of Bollobás and Tyomkyn's result concerning the number of walks in trees. Some other highlights of the paper are the following. Denote by $\hom(H,G)$ the number of homomorphisms from a graph $H$ to a graph $…
We present a detailed probabilistic and structural analysis of the set of weighted homomorphisms from the discrete torus $\mathbb{Z}_m^n$, where $m$ is even, to any fixed graph: we show that the corresponding probability distribution on such homomorphisms is close to a distribution defined constructively as a certain random perturbation of some dominant phase. This has several consequences, including solutions (in a strong form) to conjectures of Engbers and Galvin and a conjecture of Kahn and Park. Special cases include sharp asymptotics for the number of independent sets and the number of pr…
The complexity of graph homomorphisms has been a subject of intense study [11, 12, 4, 42, 21, 17, 6, 20]. The partition function $Z_{\mathbf A}(\cdot)$ of graph homomorphism is defined by a symmetric matrix $\mathbf A$ over $\mathbb C$. We prove that the complexity dichotomy of [6] extends to bounded degree graphs. More precisely, we prove that either $G \mapsto Z_{\mathbf A}(G)$ is computable in polynomial-time for every $G$, or for some $Δ> 0$ it is #P-hard over (simple) graphs $G$ with maximum degree $Δ(G) \le Δ$. The tractability criterion on $\mathbf A$ for this dichotomy is explicit, and…
Let $p$ be an odd prime. From a simple undirected graph $G$, through the classical procedures of Baer (Trans. Am. Math. Soc., 1938), Tutte (J. Lond. Math. Soc., 1947) and Lovász (B. Braz. Math. Soc., 1989), there is a $p$-group $P_G$ of class $2$ and exponent $p$ that is naturally associated with $G$. Our first result is to show that this construction of groups from graphs respects isomorphism types. That is, given two graphs $G$ and $H$, $G$ and $H$ are isomorphic as graphs if and only if $P_G$ and $P_H$ are isomorphic as groups. Our second contribution is a new homomorphism notion for graphs…
Vertex coloring of a graph $G$ with $n$-colors can be equivalently thought to be a graph homomorphism (edge preserving vertex mapping) of $G$ to the complete graph $K_n$ of order $n$. So, in that sense, the chromatic number $χ(G)$ of $G$ will be the order of the smallest complete graph to which $G$ admits a homomorphism to. As every graph, which is not a complete graph, admits a homomorphism to a smaller complete graph, we can redefine the chromatic number $χ(G)$ of $G$ to be the order of the smallest graph to which $G$ admits a homomorphism to. Of course, such a smallest graph must be a compl…
Studying inequalities between subgraph- or homomorphism-densities is an important topic in graph theory. Sums of squares techniques have proven useful in dealing with such questions. Using an approach from real algebraic geometry, we strengthen a Positivstellensatz for simple quantum graphs by Lovász and Szegedy, and we prove several new Positivstellensätze for nonnegativity of quantum multigraphs. We provide new examples and counterexamples.
We prove the Ramsey property for classes of ordered structures with closures and given local properties. This generalises earlier results: the Nešetřil-Rödl Theorem, the Ramsey property of partial orders and metric spaces as well as the authors' Ramsey lift of bowtie-free graphs. We use this framework to solve several open problems and give new examples of Ramsey classes. Among others, we find Ramsey lifts of convexly ordered $S$-metric spaces and prove the Ramsey theorem for finite models (i.e. structures with both functions and relations) thus providing the ultimate generalisation of the str…
