We prove that any $n$-vertex graph whose complement is triangle-free contains $n^2/12-o(n^2)$ edge-disjoint triangles. This is tight for the disjoint union of two cliques of order $n/2$. We also prove a corresponding stability theorem, that all large graphs attaining the above bound are close to being bipartite. Our results answer a question of Alon and Linial, and make progress on a conjecture of Erdős.
We show the quarter of a century old conjecture that every $K_4$-free graph with $n$ vertices and $\lfloor n^2/4 \rfloor +k$ edges contains $k$ pairwise edge disjoint triangles.
Let $k\ge 2$ and $n_1\ge n_2\ge n_3\ge n_4$ be integers such that $n_4$ is sufficiently larger than $k$. We determine the maximum number of edges of a 4-partite graph with parts of sizes $n_1,\dots, n_4$ that does not contain $k$ vertex-disjoint triangles. For any $r> t\ge 3$, we give a conjecture on the maximum number of edges of an $r$-partite graph that does not contain $k$ vertex-disjoint cliques $K_t$.
An edge-colored graph is called rainbow if all the colors on its edges are distinct. Given a positive integer n and a graph G, the anti-Ramsey number ar(n,G) is the maximum number of colors in an edge-coloring of K_{n} with no rainbow copy of G. Denote by kC_{3} the union of k vertex-disjoint copies of C_{3}. In this paper, we determine the anti-Ramsey number ar(n,kC_{3}) for n=3k and n\geq2k^{2}-k+2, respectively. When 3k\leq n\leq 2k^{2}-k+2, we give lower and upper bounds for ar(n, kC_{3}).
We study extremal type problem arising from the question: What is the maximum number of edge-disjoint non-crossing perfect matchings on a set S of 2n points in the plane such that their union is a triangle-free geometric graph? We approach this problem by considering four different situations of S. In particular, in the general position, we obtain (i) a sufficient condition for the existence of n edge-disjoint non-crossing perfect matchings in the general position whose union is a maximal triangle-free geometric graph, and (ii) a lower bound on the number of edge-disjoint non-crossing perfect …
The maximum number of triangles in graphs without vertex disjoint friendship graphs
School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学数学科学学院）；School of Mathematics, Nanjing University（南京大学数学系）；Faculty of Environment and Information Sciences, Yokohama National University（横滨国立大学环境信息学部）
Motivated by Chudnovsky's structure theorem of bull-free graphs, Abu-Khzam, Feghali, and Müller have recently proved that deciding if a graph has a vertex partition into disjoint cliques and a triangle-free graph is NP-complete for five graph classes. The problem is trivial for the intersection of these five classes. We prove that the problem is NP-complete for the intersection of two subsets of size four among the five classes. We also show NP-completeness for other small classes, such as graphs with maximum degree 4 and line graphs.
Both Cuckler and Yuster independently conjectured that when $n$ is an odd positive multiple of $3$ every regular tournament on $n$ vertices contains a collection of $n/3$ vertex-disjoint copies of the cyclic triangle. Soon after, Keevash and Sudakov proved that if $G$ is an orientation of a graph on $n$ vertices in which every vertex has both indegree and outdegree at least $(1/2 - o(1))n$, then there exists a collection of vertex-disjoint cyclic triangles that covers all but at most $3$ vertices. In this paper, we resolve the conjecture of Cuckler and Yuster for sufficiently large $n$.
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…
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 …
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…
In this paper we study the flow-property of graphs containing a spanning triangle-tree. Our main results provide a structure characterization of graphs with a spanning triangle-tree admitting a nowhere-zero $3$-flow. All these graphs without nowhere-zero $3$-flows are constructed from $K_4$ by a so-called bull-growing operation. This generalizes a result of Fan et al. in 2008 on triangularly-connected graphs and particularly shows that every $4$-edge-connected graph with a spanning triangle-tree has a nowhere-zero $3$-flow. A well-known classical theorem of Jaeger in 1979 shows that every grap…
We study the problem of finding pairwise vertex-disjoint triangles in the randomly perturbed graph model, which is the union of any $n$-vertex graph $G$ satisfying a given minimum degree condition and the binomial random graph $G(n,p)$. We prove that asymptotically almost surely $G \cup G(n,p)$ contains at least $\min\{δ(G), \lfloor n/3 \rfloor\}$ pairwise vertex-disjoint triangles, provided $p \ge C \log n/n$, where $C$ is a large enough constant. This is a perturbed version of an old result of Dirac. Our result is asymptotically optimal and answers a question of Han, Morris, and Treglown [RS…
A graph $G = (V, E)$ is \emph{partitionable} if there exists a partition $\{A, B\}$ of $V$ such that $A$ induces a disjoint union of cliques and $B$ induces a triangle-free graph. In this paper we investigate the computational complexity of deciding whether a graph is partitionable. The problem is known to be $\NP$-complete on arbitrary graphs. Here it is proved that if a graph $G$ is bull-free, planar, perfect, $K_4$-free or does not contain certain holes then deciding whether $G$ is partitionable is $\NP$-complete. This answers an open question posed by Thomass{é}, Trotignon and Vuškovi{ć}. …
We prove that every $n$-vertex graph with at least $\binom{n}{2} - (n - 4)$ edges has a fractional triangle decomposition, for $n \ge 7$. This is a key ingredient in our proof, given in a companion paper, that every $n$-vertex $2$-coloured complete graph contains $n^2/12 + o(n^2)$ edge-disjoint monochromatic triangles, which confirms a conjecture of Erdős.
We generalize a parity result of Fleishner and Stiebitz that being combined with Alon--Tarsi polynomial method allowed them to prove that a 4-regular graph formed by a Hamiltonian cycle and several disjoint triangles is always 3-choosable. Also we present a modification of polynomial method and show how it gives slightly more combinatorial information about colourings than direct application of Alon's Combinatorial Nullstellensatz.
A graph $G$ is $(a,b)$-choosable if for any color list of size $a$ associated with each vertex, one can choose a subset of $b$ colors such that adjacent vertices are colored with disjoint color sets. This paper proves that for any integer $m\ge 1$, every finite triangle-free induced subgraph of the triangular lattice is $(5m,2m)$-choosable.
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.
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.
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.
Aksenov proved that in a planar graph G with at most one triangle, every precoloring of a 4-cycle can be extended to a 3-coloring of G. We give an exact characterization of planar graphs with two triangles in that some precoloring of a 4-cycle does not extend. We apply this characterization to solve the precoloring extension problem from two 4-cycles in a triangle-free planar graph in the case that the precolored 4-cycles are separated by many disjoint 4-cycles. The latter result is used in followup papers to give detailed information about the structure of 4-critical triangle-free graphs embe…
Let $G$ be a graph of order $n$ with an edge-coloring $c$, and let $δ^c(G)$ denote the minimum color-degree of $G$. A subgraph $F$ of $G$ is called rainbow if any two edges of $F$ have distinct colors. There have been a lot results in the existing literature on rainbow triangles in edge-colored complete graphs. Fujita and Magnant showed that for an edge-colored complete graph $G$ of order $n$, if $δ^c(G)\geq \frac{n+1}{2}$, then every vertex of $G$ is contained in a rainbow triangle. In this paper, we show that if $δ^c(G)\geq \frac{n+k}{2}$, then every vertex of $G$ is contained in at least $k…
Recently, Davies, Jenssen, Perkins, and Roberts gave a very nice proof of the result (due, in various parts, to Kahn, Galvin-Tetali, and Zhao) that the independence polynomial of a $d$-regular graph is maximized by disjoint copies of $K_{d,d}$. Their proof uses linear programming bounds on the distribution of a cleverly chosen random variable. In this paper, we use this method to give lower bounds on the independence polynomial of regular graphs. We also give new bounds on the number of independent sets in triangle-free regular graphs.
We prove that every triangle-free $4$-critical graph $G$ satisfies $e(G) \geq \frac{5v(G)+2}{3}$. This result gives a unified proof that triangle-free planar graphs are $3$-colourable, and that graphs of girth at least five which embed in either the projective plane, torus, or Klein Bottle are $3$-colourable, which are results of Grötzsch, Thomassen, and Thomas and Walls. Our result is nearly best possible, as Davies has constructed triangle-free $4$-critical graphs $G$ such that $e(G) = \frac{5v(G) + 4}{3}$. To prove this result, we prove a more general result characterizing sparse $4$-critic…
Partitioning the edges of a graph into edge disjoint triangles forms a triangle decomposition of the graph. A famous conjecture by Nash-Williams from 1970 asserts that any sufficiently large, triangle divisible graph on $n$ vertices with minimum degree at least $0.75 n$ admits a triangle decomposition. In the light of recent results, the fractional version of this problem is of central importance. A fractional triangle decomposition is an assignment of non-negative weights to each triangle in a graph such that the sum of the weights along each edge is precisely 1. We show that for any graph on…
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.)…
In this paper, we prove an analogue of Corrádi and Hajnal's classical theorem. There exists $n_0$ such that for every $n \in 3\mathbb{Z}$ when $n \ge n_0$ the following holds. If $G$ is an oriented graph on $n$ vertices and every vertex has both indegree and outdegree at least $7n/18$, then $G$ contains a perfect transitive triangle tiling, which is a collection of vertex-disjoint transitive triangles covering every vertex of $G$. This result is best possible, as, for every $n \in 3\mathbb{Z}$, there exists an oriented graph $G$ on $n$ vertices without a perfect transitive triangle tiling in w…
Recently, settling a question of Erdős, Balogh and Petříčková showed that there are at most $2^{n^2/8+o(n^2)}$ $n$-vertex maximal triangle-free graphs, matching the previously known lower bound. Here we characterize the typical structure of maximal triangle-free graphs. We show that almost every maximal triangle-free graph $G$ admits a vertex partition $X\cup Y$ such that $G[X]$ is a perfect matching and $Y$ is an independent set. Our proof uses the Ruzsa-Szemerédi removal lemma, the Erdős-Simonovits stability theorem, and recent results of Balogh-Morris-Samotij and Saxton-Thomason on characte…
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{…
Let $k \ge 3$ be an integer, $H_{k}(G)$ be the set of vertices of degree at least $2k$ in a graph $G$, and $L_{k}(G)$ be the set of vertices of degree at most $2k-2$ in $G$. In 1963, Dirac and Erdős proved that $G$ contains $k$ (vertex-)disjoint cycles whenever $|H_{k}(G)| - |L_{k}(G)| \ge k^{2} + 2k - 4$. The main result of this paper is that for $k \ge 2$, every graph $G$ with $|V(G)| \ge 3k$ containing at most $t$ disjoint triangles and with $|H_{k}(G)| - |L_{k}(G)| \ge 2k + t$ contains $k$ disjoint cycles. This yields that if $k \ge 2$ and $|H_{k}(G)| - |L_{k}(G)| \ge 3k$, then $G$ contain…
Kostochka and Yancey proved that every 5-critical graph G satisfies: |E(G)|>= (9/4)|V(G)| - 5/4. A construction of Ore gives an infinite family of graphs meeting this bound. We prove that there exists e,d > 0 such that if G is a 5-critical graph, then |E(G)| >= (9/4 + e)|V(G)|- 5/4 - dT(G), where T(G) is the maximum number of vertex-disjoint cliques of size three or four where cliques of size four have twice the weight of a clique of size three. As a corollary, a triangle-free 5-critical graph G satisfies: |E(G)|>=(9/4 + e)|V(G)| - 5/4.
A famous conjecture of Caccetta and Häggkvist is that in a digraph on $n$ vertices and minimum out-degree at least $\frac{n}{r}$ there is a directed cycle of length $r$ or less. We consider the following generalization: in an undirected graph on $n$ vertices, any collection of $n$ disjoint sets of edges, each of size at least $\frac{n}{r}$, has a rainbow cycle of length $r$ or less. We focus on the case $r=3$, and prove the existence of a rainbow triangle under somewhat stronger conditions than in the conjecture. For any fixed $k$ and large enough $n$, we determine the maximum number of edges …
We describe a general approach of determining the distribution of spanning subgraphs in the random graph $\G(n,p)$. In particular, we determine the distribution of spanning subgraphs of certain given degree sequences, which is a generalisation of the $d$-factors, of spanning triangle-free subgraphs, of (directed) Hamilton cycles and of spanning subgraphs that are isomorphic to a collection of vertex disjoint (directed) triangles.
The {\em disjointness graph} $G=G({\cal S})$ of a set of segments ${\cal S}$ in $R^d$, $d\ge 2,$ is a graph whose vertex set is ${\cal S}$ and two vertices are connected by an edge if and only if the corresponding segments are disjoint. We prove that the chromatic number of $G$ satisfies $χ(G)\le(ω(G))^4+(ω(G))^3$, where $ω(G)$ denotes the clique number of $G$. It follows, that $\cal S$ has $Ω(n^{1/5})$ pairwise intersecting or pairwise disjoint elements. Stronger bounds are established for lines in space, instead of segments. We show that computing $ω(G)$ and $χ(G)$ for disjointness graphs of…
Denote by $λK_v$ the complete graph of order $v$ with multiplicity $λ$. Let $λK_v-λK_w-λK_u$ be the graph obtained from $λK_v$ by the removal of the edges of two vertex disjoint complete multi-subgraphs with multiplicity $ λ$ of orders $ w $ and $ u $, respectively. When $λ$ is odd, it is shown that there exists a triangle decomposition of $λK_v-λK_w-λK_u$ if and only if $v\geq w+u+\max\{u,w\}$, $ λ\left({v\choose 2}-{u\choose 2}-{w\choose 2}\right) \equiv 0 \pmod 3$ and $λ(v-w) \equiv λ(v-u) \equiv λ(v-1) \equiv 0 \pmod 2$. When $λ$ is even, it is shown that for large enough $v$, the elementa…
We determine the smallest simple triangle-free binary matroids that have no five-element independent flat. This solves a special case of a conjecture of Nelson and Norin.
It is shown that for $n\geq 141$, among all triangle-free graphs on $n$ vertices, the complete equibipartite graph is the unique triangle-free graph with the greatest number of cycles.
A celebrated conjecture of Zs. Tuza says that in any (finite) graph, the minimum size of a cover of triangles by edges is at most twice the maximum size of a set of edge-disjoint triangles. Resolving a recent question of Bennett, Dudek, and Zerbib, we show that this is true for random graphs; more precisely: \[ \mbox{for any $p=p(n)$, $\mathbb P(\mbox{$G_{n,p}$ satisfies Tuza's Conjecture})\rightarrow 1 $ (as $n\rightarrow\infty$).} \]
We determine all graphs whose adjacency matrix has at most two eigenvalues (multiplicities included) different from $\pm 1$ and decide which of these graphs are determined by their spectrum. This includes the so-called friendship graphs, which consist of a number of edge-disjoint triangles meeting in one vertex. It turns out that the friendship graph is determined by its spectrum, except when the number of triangles equals sixteen.
A triangle-free graph G is called k-existentially complete if for every induced k-vertex subgraph H of G, every extension of H to a (k+1)-vertex triangle-free graph can be realized by adding another vertex of G to H. Cherlin asked whether k-existentially complete triangle-free graphs exist for every k. Here we present known and new constructions of 3-existentially complete triangle-free graphs.
Consider the triangle-free graph process, which starts from the empty graph on $n$ vertices and a random ordering of the possible ${n \choose 2}$ edges; the edges are added in this ordering provided the graph remains triangle free. We will show that there exists a constant $c$ such that no copy of any fixed finite triangle-free graph on $k$ vertices with at least $ck$ edges asymptotically almost surely appears in the triangle-free graph process.
For a subgraph $G$ of the blow-up of a graph $F$, we let $δ^*(G)$ be the smallest minimum degree over all of the bipartite subgraphs of $G$ induced by pairs of parts that correspond to edges of $F$. In [Triangle-factors in a balanced blown-up triangle. Discrete Mathematics, 2000], Johansson proved that if $G$ is a spanning subgraph of the blow-up of $C_3$ with parts of size $n$ and $δ^*(G) \ge \frac{2}{3}n + \sqrt{n}$, then $G$ contains $n$ vertex-disjoint triangles, and presented the following conjecture of Häggkvist: If $G$ is a spanning subgraph of the blow-up of $C_k$ with parts of size $n…
Scott conjectured that the class of graphs with no induced subdivision of a given graph is $χ$-bounded. We verify his conjecture for maximal triangle-free graphs.
The triangle-free process begins with an empty graph on n vertices and iteratively adds edges chosen uniformly at random subject to the constraint that no triangle is formed. We determine the asymptotic number of edges in the maximal triangle-free graph at which the triangle-free process terminates. We also bound the independence number of this graph, which gives an improved lower bound on the Ramsey numbers R(3,t): we show R(3,t) > (1-o(1)) t^2 / (4 log t), which is within a 4+o(1) factor of the best known upper bound. Our improvement on previous analyses of this process exploits the self-cor…
This paper proves that for each positive integer $m$, there is a triangle-free planar graph $G$ which is not $(3m+ \lceil \frac m{17} \rceil-1, m)$-choosable.
We consider the triangle-free process: given an integer n, start by taking a uniformly random ordering of the edges of the complete n-vertex graph K_n. Then, traverse the ordered edges and add each traversed edge to an (initially empty) evolving graph - unless its addition creates a triangle. We study the evolving graph at around the time where Θ(n^{3/2 + ε}) edges have been traversed for any fixed ε\in (0,10^{-10}). At that time and for any fixed triangle-free graph F, we give an asymptotically tight estimation of the expected number of copies of F in the evolving graph. For F that is balance…
We study 3-coloring properties of triangle-free planar graphs $G$ with two precolored 4-cycles $C_1$ and $C_2$ that are far apart. We prove that either every precoloring of $C_1\cup C_2$ extends to a 3-coloring of $G$, or $G$ contains one of two special substructures which uniquely determine which 3-colorings of $C_1\cup C_2$ extend. As a corollary, we prove that there exists a constant $D>0$ such that if $H$ is a planar triangle-free graph and $S\subseteq V(H)$ consists of vertices at pairwise distances at least $D$, then every precoloring of $S$ extends to a 3-coloring of $H$. This gives a p…
