A set $P$ of vertices in a graph $G$ is an open packing if no two distinct vertices in $P$ have a common neighbor. Among all maximal open packings in $G$, the smallest cardinality is denoted $ρ^{\rm o}_L(G)$ and the largest cardinality is $ρ^{\rm o}(G)$. There exist graphs for which these two invariants are arbitrarily far apart. In this paper we begin the investigation of the class of graphs that have one size of maximal open packings. By presenting a method of constructing such graphs we show that every graph is the induced subgraph of a graph in this class. The main result of the paper is a structural characterization of those $G$ that do not have a cycle of order less than $15$ and for which $ρ^{\rm o}_L(G)=ρ^{\rm o}(G)$.
We prove a common generalization of the maximal independent arborescence packing theorem of Cs. Király and two of our earlier works about packing branchings in infinite digraphs.
Király in [On maximal independent arborescence packing, SIAM J. Discrete. Math. 30 (4) (2016), 2107-2114] solved the following packing problem: Given a digraph $D = (V, A)$, a matroid $M$ on a set $S = \{s_{1}, \ldots,s_{k} \}$ along with a map $π: S \rightarrow V$, find $k$ arc-disjoint maximal arborescences $T_{1}, \ldots ,T_{k}$ with roots $π(s_{1}), \ldots ,π(s_{k})$, such that, for any $v \in V$, the set $\{s_{i} : v \in V(T_{i})\}$ is independent and its rank reaches the theoretical maximum. In this paper, we give a new characterization for packing of maximal independent mixed arborescen…
Every set of natural numbers determines a generating function convergent for $q \in (-1,1)$ whose behavior as $q \rightarrow 1^-$ determines a germ. These germs admit a natural partial ordering that can be used to compare sizes of sets of natural numbers in a manner that generalizes both cardinality of finite sets and density of infinite sets. For any finite set $D$ of positive integers, call a set $S$ "$D$-avoiding" if no two elements of $S$ differ by an element of $D$. It is shown that any $D$-avoiding set that is maximal in the class of $D$-avoiding sets (with respect to germ-ordering) is u…
Let M be a symplectic-toric manifold of dimension at least four. This paper investigates the so called symplectic ball packing problem in the toral equivariant setting. We show that the set of toric symplectic ball packings of M admits the structure of a convex polytope. Previous work of the first author shows that up to equivalence, only CP^1 x CP^1 and CP^2 admit density one packings when n=2 and only CP^n admits density one packings when n>2. In contrast, we show that for a fixed n>=2 and each r in (0, 1), there are uncountably many inequivalent 2n-dimensional symplectic-toric manifolds wit…
Let $G$ and $H$ be graphs. We say that $P$ is an $H$-packing of $G$ if $P$ is a set of edge-disjoint copies of $H$ in $G$. An $H$-packing $P$ is maximal if there is no other $H$-packing of $G$ that properly contains $P$. Packings of maximum cardinality have been studied intensively, with several recent breakthrough results. Here, we consider minimum cardinality maximal packings. An $H$-packing $P$ is clumsy if it is maximal of minimum size. Let $cl(G,H)$ be the size of a clumsy $H$-packing of $G$. We provide nontrivial bounds for $cl(G,H)$, and in many cases asymptotically determine $cl(G,H)$ …
Recently, a combinatorial settlement planning model was introduced. The idea underlying the model is that the houses are randomly being built on a rectangular tract of land according to the specified rule until the maximal configuration is reached, that is, no further houses can be built while still following that rule. Once the building of the settlement is done, the main question is what percentage of the tract of land on which the settlement was built has been used, i.e. what is the building density of the maximal configuration that was reached. In this article, with the aid of simulations,…
Packing density is a permutation occurrence statistic which describes the maximal number of permutations of a given type that can occur in another permutation. In this article we focus on containment of sets of permutations. Although this question has been tangentially considered previously, this is the first systematic study of it. We find the packing density for various special sets of permutations and study permutation and pattern co-occurrence.
The \emph{spanning tree packing number} of a graph $G$ is the maximum number of edge-disjoint spanning trees contained in $G$. Let $k\geq 1$ be a fixed integer. Palmer and Spencer proved that in almost every random graph process, the hitting time for having $k$ edge-disjoint spanning trees equals the hitting time for having minimum degree $k$. In this paper, we prove that for any $p$ such that $(\log n+ω(1))/n\leq p\leq (1.1\log n)/n$, almost surely the random graph $G(n,p)$ satisfies that the spanning tree packing number is equal to the minimum degree. Note that this bound for $p$ will allow …
The construction of optimal line packings in real or complex Euclidean spaces has shown to be a tantalizingly difficult task, because it includes the problem of finding maximal sets of equiangular lines. In the regime where equiangular lines are not possible, some optimal packings are known, for example, those achieving the orthoplex bound related to maximal sets of mutually unbiased bases. In this paper, we investigate the packing of subspaces instead of lines and determine the implications of maximality in this context. We leverage the existence of real or complex maximal mutually unbiased b…
For a given positive integer t we consider graphs having maximal independent sets of precisely t distinct cardinalities and restrict our attention to those that have no vertices of degree one. In the situation when t is four or larger and the length of the shortest cycle is at least 6t-6, we completely characterize such graphs.
A set $S\subseteq V$ is $α$-dominating if for all $v\in V-S$, $|N(v) \cap S | \geq α|N(v)|.$ The $α$-domination number of $G$ equals the minimum cardinality of an $α$-dominating set $S$ in $G$. Since being introduced by Dunbar, et al. in 2000, $α$-domination has been studied for various graphs and a variety of bounds have been developed. In this paper, we propose a new parameter derived by flipping the inequality in the definition of $α$-domination. We say a set $S \subset V$ is a $β$-packing set of a graph $G$ if $S$ is a proper, maximal set having the property that for all vertices $v \in V-…
We provide a new type of proof for the Koebe-Andreev-Thurston (KAT) planar circle packing theorem based on combinatorial edge-flips. In particular, we show that starting from a disk packing with a maximal planar contact graph $G$, one can remove any flippable edge $e^-$ of this graph and then continuously flow the disks in the plane, such that at the end of the flow, one obtains a new disk packing whose contact graph is the graph resulting from flipping the edge $e^-$ in $G$. This flow is parameterized by a single inversive distance.
Every set of natural numbers determines a generating function convergent for $q \in (-1,1)$ whose behavior as $q \rightarrow 1^-$ determines a germ. These germs admit a natural partial ordering that can be used to compare sets of natural numbers in a manner that generalizes both cardinality of finite sets and density of infinite sets. For any finite set $D$ of positive integers, call a set $S$ "$D$-avoiding" if no two elements of $S$ differ by an element of $D$. We study the problem of determining, for fixed $D$, all $D$-avoiding sets that are maximal in the germ order. In many cases, we can s…
Recently, we enumerate up to isometry, all locally rigid circle packings on the unit sphere with number of circles N<12. This problem is equivalent to the enumeration of irreducible contact graphs. In this paper we show that by using the list of irreducible graphs can solve various problems of extreme packings such as the Tammes problem for the sphere and the projective plane, the maximal contacts problem, Danzer's and other problems on irreducible contact graphs.
Let $G$ be a graph of order $n(G)$ and vertex set $V(G)$. Given a set $S\subseteq V(G)$, we define the external neighbourhood of $S$ as the set $N_e(S)$ of all vertices in $V(G)\setminus S$ having at least one neighbour in $S$. The differential of $S$ is defined to be $\partial(S)=|N_e(S)|-|S|$. In this paper, we introduce the study of the $2$-packing differential of a graph, which we define as $\partial_{2p}(G)=\max\{\partial(S): S\subseteq V(G) \text{ is a }2\text{-packing}\}.$ We show that the $2$-packing differential is closely related to several graph parameters, including the packing num…
Given a non-decreasing sequence S = (s 1,s 2,. .. ,s k) of positive integers, an S-packing edge-coloring of a graph G is a partition of the edge set of G into k subsets {X 1 ,X 2,. .. ,X k } such that for each 1 $\le$ i $\le$ k, the distance between two distinct edges e, e ' $\in$ X i is at least s i + 1. This paper studies S-packing edge-colorings of cubic graphs. Among other results, we prove that cubic graphs having a 2-factor are (1,1,1,3,3)-packing edge-colorable, (1,1,1,4,4,4,4,4)-packing edge-colorable and (1,1,2,2,2,2,2)-packing edge-colorable. We determine sharper results for cubic gr…
László Fejes Tóth and Aladár Heppes proposed the following generalization of the kissing number problem. Given a ball in $\mathbb{R}^d$, consider a family of balls touching it, and another family of balls touching the first family. Find the maximal possible number of balls in this arrangement, provided that no two balls intersect by interiors, and all balls are congruent. They showed that the answer for disks on the plane is $19$. They also conjectured that if there are three families of disks instead of two, the answer is $37$. In this paper we confirm this conjecture.
A compact circle-packing $P$ of the Euclidean plane is a set of circles which bound mutually disjoint open discs with the property that, for every circle $S\in P$, there exists a maximal indexed set $\{A_{0},\ldots,A_{n-1}\}\subseteq P$ so that, for every $i\in\{0,\ldots,n-1\}$, the circle $A_{i}$ is tangent to both circles $S$ and $A_{i+1\mod n}.$ We show that there exist at most $13617$ pairs $(r,s)$ with $0<s<r<1$ for which there exist a compact circle-packing of the plane consisting of circles with radii $s$, $r$ and $1$. We discuss computing the exact values of such $0<s<r<1$ as roots of …
In this work we consider a straightforward linear programming formulation of the recently introduced $\{k\}$-packing function problem in graphs, for each fixed value of the positive integer number $k$. We analyse a special relation between the case $ k = 1$ and $ k \geq 2$ and give a sufficient condition for optimality ---the perfection--- of the closed neighbourhood matrix $N[G]$ of the input graph $G$. We begin a structural study of graphs satisfying this condition. In particular, we look for a characterization of graphs that have perfect closed neighbourhood matrices which involves the prop…
We prove that for every integer $t\ge 1$ there exists a constant $c_t$ such that for every $K_t$-minor-free graph $G$, and every set $S$ of balls in $G$, the minimum size of a set of vertices of $G$ intersecting all the balls of $S$ is at most $c_t$ times the maximum number of vertex-disjoint balls in $S$. This was conjectured by Chepoi, Estellon, and Vaxès in 2007 in the special case of planar graphs and of balls having the same radius.
