Extremal problems on disjoint path covers of graphs
School of Mathematics and Statistics, Key Laboratory of Analytical Mathematics and Applications (Ministry of Education), Fujian Key Laboratory of Analytical Mathematics and Applications (FJKLAMA), Center for Applied Mathematics of Fujian Province (FJNU), Fujian Normal University（福建师范大学数学与统计学院，分析数学及应用教育部重点实验室，福建省分析数学及应用重点实验室（FJKLAMA），福建省应用数学中心（FJNU））
In 1962, Erdős characterized the maximum size of nonhamiltonian graphs of order $n$ with minimum degree at least $k$. Later, Ning and Peng [Combin. Probab. Comput. 29 (2020) 128-136] extended Erdős's results to the clique condition and provided the maximum clique number for nonhamiltonian graphs of order $n$ with minimum degree at least $k$. Recently, Zhang [European J. Combin. 112 (2023) 103728] determined the maximum number of $s$-cliques in nonhamiltonian graphs with prescribed order and minimum degree. A natural extension is to characterize the maximum number of $s$-cliques under other graph properties. Notably, disjoint path cover problems are closely related to Hamiltonicity. In this paper, we generalize results on Hamiltonicity and establish sufficient conditions for a graph to possess one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many $t$-disjoint path covers in terms of the number of cliques and the $α$-spectral radius, respectively. Furthermore, we characterize the extremal graphs that attain these bounds respectively.
In the 1960s, Erdős and his cooperators initiated the research of the maximum numbers of edges in a graph or a planar graph on $n$ vertices without $k$ edge-disjoint cycles. This problem had been solved for $k\leq4$. As pointed out by Bollobás, it is very difficult for general $k$. Recently, Tait and Tobin [J. Combin. Theory Ser. B, 2017] confirmed a famous conjecture on maximum spectral radius of $n$-vertex planar graphs. Motivated by the above results, we consider two extremal problems on planar graphs without $k$ edge-disjoint cycles. We first determine the maximum number of edges in a plan…
The $kK_{r+1}$ is the union of $k$ disjoint copies of $(r+1)$-clique. Moon [Canad. J. Math. 20 (1968) 95--102] and Simonovits [Theory of Graphs (Proc. colloq., Tihany, 1996)] independently showed that if $n$ is sufficiently large, then $K_{k-1}\vee T_{n-k+1,r}$ is the unique extremal graph for $kK_{r+1}$. In this paper, we consider the graph which has the maximum spectral radius among all graphs without $k$ disjoint cliques. We prove that if $G$ attains the maximum spectral radius over all $n$-vertex $kK_{r+1}$-free graphs for sufficiently large $n$, then $G$ is isomorphic to $K_{k-1}\vee T_{n…
The problem of determining the smallest number of edges, $h(n;\barκ\geq r)$, which guarantees that any graph with $n$ vertices and $h(n;\barκ\geq r)$ edges will contain a pair of vertices joined by $r$ internally disjoint paths was posed by Erdös and Gallai. Bollobás considered the problem of determining the largest number of edges $f(n;\barκ\leq \ell)$ for graphs with $n$ vertices and local connectivity at most $\ell$. One can see that $f(n;\barκ\leq \ell)= h(n;\barκ\geq \ell+1)-1$. These two problems had received a wide attention of many researchers in the last few decades. In the above prob…
An embedding of a graph in $3$-space is linkless if for every two disjoint cycles there exists an embedded ball that contains one of the cycles and is disjoint from the other. We prove that every bipartite linklessly embeddable (simple) graph on $n\ge5$ vertices has at most $3n-10$ edges, unless it is isomorphic to the complete bipartite graph $K_{3,n-3}$.
The concept of maximum local connectivity $\bar κ$ of a graph was introduced by Bollobás. One of the problems about it is to determine the largest number of edges $f(n;\barκ\leq \ell)$ for graphs of order $n$ that have local connectivity at most $\ell$. We consider a generalization of the above concept and problem. For $S\subseteq V(G)$ and $|S|\geq 2$, the \emph{generalized local connectivity} $κ(S)$ is the maximum number of internally disjoint trees connecting $S$ in $G$. The parameter $\barκ_k(G)=max\{κ(S)|S\subseteq V(G),|S|=k\}$ is called the \emph{maximum generalized local connectivity} …
Liu, Hong, Gu, and Lai proved if the second largest eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix of graph $G$ with minimum degree $δ\ge 2m+2 \ge 4$ satisfies $λ_2(G) < δ- \frac{2m+1}{δ+1}$, then $G$ contains at least $m+1$ edge-disjoint spanning trees, which verified a generalization of a conjecture by Cioabă and Wong. We show this bound is essentially the best possible by constructing $d$-regular graphs $\mathcal{G}_{m,d}$ for all $d \ge 2m+2 \ge 4$ with at most $m$ edge-disjoint spanning trees and $λ_2(\mathcal{G}_{m,d}) < d-\frac{2m+1}{d+3}$. As a corollary, we show that a spectral inequality on grap…
The Turán number of a graph $H$, $\text{ex}(n,H)$, is the maximum number of edges in a graph on $n$ vertices which does not have $H$ as a subgraph. A wheel $W_n$ is an $n$-vertex graph formed by connecting a single vertex to all vertices of a cycle $C_{n-1}$. Let $mW_{2k+1}$ denote the $m$ vertex-disjoint copies of $W_{2k+1}$. For sufficiently large $n$, we determine the Turán number and all extremal graphs for $mW_{2k+1}$. We also provide the Turán number and all extremal graphs for $W^{h}:=\bigcup\limits^m_{i=1}W_{k_i}$ when $n$ is sufficiently large, where the number of even wheels is $h$ a…
A well-known result of Kupitz from 1982 asserts that the maximal number of edges in a convex geometric graph (CGG) on $n$ vertices that does not contain $k+1$ pairwise disjoint edges is $kn$ (provided $n>2k$). For $k=1$ and $k=n/2-1$, the extremal examples are completely characterized. For all other values of $k$, the structure of the extremal examples is far from known: their total number is unknown, and only a few classes of examples were presented, that are almost symmetric, consisting roughly of the $kn$ "longest possible" edges of $CK(n)$, the complete CGG of order $n$. In order to unders…
The typical extremal problem asks how large a structure can be without containing a forbidden substructure. The Erdős-Rothschild problem, introduced in 1974 by Erdős and Rothschild in the context of extremal graph theory, is a coloured extension, asking for the maximum number of colourings a structure can have that avoid monochromatic copies of the forbidden substructure. The celebrated Erdős-Ko-Rado theorem is a fundamental result in extremal set theory, bounding the size of set families without a pair of disjoint sets, and has since been extended to several other discrete settings. The Erdős…
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）
We prove the extremal function for $K_9^=$ minors, where $K_9^=$ denotes the complete graph $K_9$ with two edges removed. In particular, we show that any graph with $n$ vertices and at least $6n - 20$ edges either contains a $K_9^=$ minor or is isomorphic to a graph obtained from disjoint copies of $K_8$ and $K_{2, 2, 2, 2, 2}$ by identifying cliques of size 5. We utilize computer assistance to prove one of our lemmas.
For a digraph $D=(V(D), A(D))$, and a set $S\subseteq V(D)$ with $r\in S$ and $|S|\geq 2$, an $(S, r)$-tree is an out-tree $T$ rooted at $r$ with $S\subseteq V(T)$. Two $(S, r)$-trees $T_1$ and $T_2$ are said to be arc-disjoint if $A(T_1)\cap A(T_2)=\emptyset$. Two arc-disjoint $(S, r)$-trees $T_1$ and $T_2$ are said to be internally disjoint if $V(T_1)\cap V(T_2)=S$. Let $κ_{S,r}(D)$ and $λ_{S,r}(D)$ be the maximum number of internally disjoint and arc-disjoint $(S, r)$-trees in $D$, respectively. The generalized $k$-vertex-strong connectivity of $D$ is defined as $$κ_k(D)= \min \{κ_{S,r}(D)\…
Some results on the distance spectral radius and edge-disjoint spanning trees of graphs
School of Mathematics and Statistics, Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学数学与统计学院）；Xi’an-Budapest Joint Research Center for Combinatorics, Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学西安-布达佩斯组合学联合研究中心）
A path cover of a graph is a set of disjoint paths so that every vertex in the graph is contained in one of the paths. The path cover number $p(G)$ of graph $G$ is the cardinality of a path cover with the minimum number of paths. Reed in 1996 conjectured that a $2$-connected $3$-regular graph has path cover number at most $\lceil n/10\rceil$. In this paper, we confirm this conjecture.
The Fibonacci cube of dimension n, denoted as $Γ$ n , is the subgraph of n-cube Q n induced by vertices with no consecutive 1's. In this short note we prove that asymptotically all vertices of $Γ$ n are covered by a maximum set of disjoint subgraphs isomorphic to Q k , answering an open problem proposed in [2].
The balanced hypercube $BH_{n}$, proposed by Wu and Huang, is a variation of the hypercube. The paired 1-disjoint path cover of $BH_{n}$ is the Hamiltonian laceability, which was obtained by Xu et al. in [Appl. Math. Comput. 189 (2007) 1393--1401]. The paired 2-disjoint path cover of $BH_{n}$ was obtained by Cheng et al. in [Appl. Math. and Comput. 242 (2014) 127-142]. In this paper, we obtain the paired 3-disjoint path cover of $BH_{n}$ with $n\geq 3$. This result improves the above known results about the paired $k$-disjoint path covers of $BH_{n}$ for $k=1,2$.
For a multigraph $F$, the $k$-subdivision of $F$ is the graph obtained by replacing the edges of $F$ with pairwise internally vertex-disjoint paths of length $k+1$. Conlon and Lee conjectured that if $k$ is even, then the $(k-1)$-subdivision of any multigraph has extremal number $O(n^{1+\frac{1}{k}})$, and moreover, that for any simple graph $F$ there exists $\varepsilon>0$ such that the $(k-1)$-subdivision of $F$ has extremal number $O(n^{1+\frac{1}{k}-\varepsilon})$. In this paper, we prove both conjectures.
For a fixed bipartite graph H and given number c, 0<c<1, we determine the threshold T_H(c) which guarantees that any n-vertex graph with at edge density at least T_H(c) contains $(1-o(1))c/v(H) n$ vertex-disjoint copies of H. In the proof we use a variant of a technique developed by Komlos~\bcolor{[Combinatorica 20 (2000), 203-218}]
The extremal problems regarding the maximum possible size of intersecting families of various combinatorial objects have been extensively studied. In this paper, we investigate supersaturation extensions, which in this context ask for the minimum number of disjoint pairs that must appear in families larger than the extremal threshold. We study the minimum number of disjoint pairs in families of permutations and in $k$-uniform set families, and determine the structure of the optimal families. Our main tool is a removal lemma for disjoint pairs. We also determine the typical structure of $k$-uni…
The {\em planar Turán number} of $H$, denoted by $ex_{\mathcal{P}}(n,H)$, is the maximum number of edges in an $H$-free planar graph. The planar Turán number of $k\geq 3$ vertex-disjoint union of cycles is a trivial value $3n-6$. Lan, Shi and Song determine the exact value of $ex_{\mathcal{P}}(n,2C_3)$. We continue to study planar Turán number of vertex-disjoint union of cycles and obtain the exact value of $ex_{\mathcal{P}}(n,H)$, where $H$ is vertex-disjoint union of $C_3$ and $C_4$. The extremal graphs are also characterized. We also improve the lower bound of $ex_{\mathcal{P}}(n,2C_k)$ whe…
Spectral radius conditions for edge-disjoint spanning trees in $(k+c)$-edge-connected graphs
School of Mathematics and Statistics, Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学数学与统计学院）；Xi’an-Budapest Joint Research Center for Combinatorics, Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学西安-布达佩斯组合学联合研究中心）
The Turán number of a graph $H$, $ex(n,H)$, is the maximum number of edges in a simple graph of order $n$ which does not contain $H$ as a subgraph. Let $k\cdot P_3$ denote $k$ disjoint copies of a path on $3$ vertices. In this paper, we determine the value $ex(n, k\cdot P_3)$ and characterize all extremal graphs. This extends a result of Bushaw and Kettle [N. Bushaw and N. Kettle, Turán Numbers of multiple and equibipartite forests, Combin. Probab. Comput., 20(2011) 837-853.], which solved the conjecture proposed by Gorgol in [I. Gorgol. Turán numbers for disjoint copies of graphs. {\it Graphs…
Let $D$ be a digraph. We define the minimum semi-degree of $D$ as $δ^{0}(D) := \min \{δ^{+}(D), δ^{-}(D)\}$. Let $k$ be a positive integer, and let $S = \{s\}$ and $T = \{t_{1}, \dots ,t_{k}\}$ be any two disjoint subsets of $V(D)$. A set of $k$ internally disjoint paths joining source set $S$ and sink set $T$ that cover all vertices $D$ are called a one-to-many $k$-disjoint directed path cover ($k$-DDPC for short) of $D$. A digraph $D$ is semicomplete if for every pair $x,y$ of vertices of it, there is at least one arc between $x$ and $y$. In this paper, we prove that every semicomplete digra…
For a graph $H$ let $c(H)$ denote the supremum of $|E(G)|/|V(G)|$ taken over all non-null graphs $G$ not containing $H$ as a minor. We show that $$c(H) \leq \frac{|V(H)|+\mathrm{comp}(H)}{2}-1,$$ when $H$ is a union of cycles, verifying conjectures of Reed and Wood, and Harvey and Wood. We derive the above result from a theorem which allows us to find two vertex disjoint subgraphs with prescribed densities in a sufficiently dense graph, which might be of independent interest.
As a variant of the well-known hypercube, the balanced hypercube $BH_n$ was proposed as a novel interconnection network topology for parallel computing. It is known that $BH_n$ is bipartite. Assume that $S=\{s_1,s_2\}$ and $T=\{t_1,t_2\}$ are any two sets of two vertices in different partite sets of $BH_n$ ($n\geq1$). It has been proved that there exist two vertex-disjoint $s_1,t_1$-path and $s_2,t_2$-path of $BH_n$ covering all vertices of it. In this paper, we prove that there always exist two vertex-disjoint $s_1,t_1$-path and $s_2,t_2$-path covering all vertices of $BH_n$ with at most $2n-…
Let $k$ be a positive integer. Let $G$ be a balanced bipartite graph of order $2n$ with bipartition $(X, Y)$, and $S$ a subset of $X$. Suppose that every pair of nonadjacent vertices $(x,y)$ with $x\in S, y\in Y$ satisfies $d(x)+d(y)\geq n+1$. We show that if $|S|\geq 2k+2$, then $G$ contains $k$ disjoint cycles covering $S$ such that each of the $k$ cycles contains at least two vertices of $S$. Here, both the degree condition and the lower bound of $|S|$ are best possible. And we also show that if $|S|=2k+1$, then $G$ contains $k$ disjoint cycles such that each of the $k$ cycles contains at l…
For a graph $F$, the $k$-subdivision of $F$, denoted $F^k$, is the graph obtained by replacing the edges of $F$ with internally vertex-disjoint paths of length $k$. In this paper, we prove that $\mathrm{ex}(n,K_{s,t}^k)=O(n^{1+\frac{s-1}{sk}})$, which is tight for $t$ sufficiently large. This settles a conjecture of Conlon--Janzer--Lee, and improves on a substantial body of work by Conlon--Janzer--Lee and Jiang--Qiu.
Let $H$ be an $n$-vertex 3-uniform hypergraph such that every pair of vertices is in at least $n/3+o(n)$ edges. We show that $H$ contains two vertex-disjoint tight paths whose union covers the vertex set of $H$. The quantity two here is best possible and the degree condition is asymptotically best possible. This result also has an interpretation as the \emph{deficiency problems}, recently introduced by Nenadov, Sudakov and Wagner: every such $H$ can be made Hamiltonian by adding at most two vertices and all triples intersecting them.
Paired 2-disjoint path covers of Bcube under the partitioned edge fault model
College of Computer Science, Nankai University（南开大学计算机学院）；Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Nankai University（南开大学前沿交叉科学研究院）；Institute of Information and Decision Sciences, National Taipei University of Business（台北商业大学信息与决策科学研究所）
For a digraph $D$, let $δ^{0}(D) = \min \{δ^{+}(D), δ^{-}(D)\}$ be the minimum semi-degree of $D$. A set of $k$ vertex-disjoint paths, $\{P_{1}, \dots, P_{k}\}$, joining a disjoint source set $S = \{s_{1}, \dots, s_{k}\}$ and sink set $T = \{t_{1}, \dots, t_{k}\}$ is called an unpaired many-to-many $k$-disjoint directed path cover ($k$-DDPC for short) of $D$, if each $P_{j}$ joins $s_{j}$ and $t_{σ(j)}$ for some permutation $σ$ on $\{1, \dots , k\}$ and $\bigcup^{k}_{j=1} V(P_{j}) = V(D)$. In this paper, we give a new proof for the following result that every digraph $D$ with $δ^{0}(D) \geq \l…
We systematically study a natural problem in extremal graph theory, to minimize the number of edges in a graph with a fixed number of vertices, subject to a certain local condition: each vertex must be in a copy of a fixed graph $H$. We completely solve this problem when $H$ is a clique, as well as more generally when $H$ is any regular graph with degree at least about half its number of vertices. We also characterize the extremal graphs when $H$ is an Erdős-Rényi random graph. The extremal structures turn out to have the similar form as the conjectured extremal structures for a well-studied b…
In this paper we present a novel approach in extremal set theory which may be viewed as an asymmetric version of Katona's permutation method. We use it to find more Turán numbers of hypergraphs in the Erdős--Ko--Rado range. An $(a,b)$-path $P$ of length $2k-1$ consists of $2k-1$ sets of size $r=a+b$ as follows. Take $k$ pairwise disjoint $a$-element sets $A_0, A_2, \dots, A_{2k-2}$ and other $k$ pairwise disjoint $b$-element sets $B_1, B_3, \dots, B_{2k-1}$ and order them linearly as $A_0, B_1, A_2, B_3, A_4\dots$. Define the (hyper)edges of $P_{2k-1}(a,b)$ as the sets of the form $A_i\cup B_{…
The odd wheel $W_{2k+1}$ is the graph formed by joining a vertex to a cycle of length $2k$. In this paper, we investigate the largest value of the spectral radius of the adjacency matrix of an $n$-vertex graph that does not contain $W_{2k+1}$. We determine the structure of the spectral extremal graphs for all $k\geq 2, k\not\in \{4,5\}$. When $k=2$, we show that these spectral extremal graphs are among the Turán-extremal graphs on $n$ vertices that do not contain $W_{2k+1}$ and have the maximum number of edges, but when $k\geq 9$, we show that the family of spectral extremal graphs and the fam…
We prove a general lemma (inspired by a lemma of Holroyd and Talbot) about the connection of the largest cardinalities (or weight) of structures satisfying some hereditary property and substructures satisfying the same hereditary property. We use it to show how results concerning forbidden subposet problems in the Boolean poset imply analogous results in the poset of subspaces of a finite vector space. We also study generalized forbidden subposet problems in the poset of subspaces.
The problem of bounding the size of a set system under various intersection restrictions has a central place in extremal combinatorics. We investigate the maximum number of disjoint pairs a set system can have in this setting. In particular, we show that for any pair of set systems $(\mathcal{A}, \mathcal{B})$ which avoid a cross-intersection of size $t$, the number of disjoint pairs $(A, B)$ with $A \in \mathcal{A}$ and $B \in \mathcal{B}$ is at most $\sum_{k=0}^{t-1}\binom{n}{k}2^{n-k}$. This implies an asymptotically best possible upper bound on the number of disjoint pairs in a single $t$-…
In this short note, we address two problems in extremal set theory regarding intersecting families. The first problem is a question posed by Kupavskii: is it true that given two disjoint cross-intersecting families $\mathcal{A}, \mathcal{B} \subset \binom{[n]}{k}$, they must satisfy $\min\{|\mathcal{A}|, |\mathcal{B}|\} \le \frac{1}{2} \binom{n-1}{k-1}$? We give an affirmative answer for $n \ge 2k^2$, and construct families showing that this range is essentially the best one could hope for, up to a constant factor. The second problem is a conjecture of Frankl. It states that for $n \ge 3k$, th…
Let F be a set system on [n] with all sets having k elements and every pair of sets intersecting. The celebrated theorem of Erdos-Ko-Rado from 1961 says that any such system has size at most ${n-1 \choose k-1}$. A natural question, which was asked by Ahlswede in 1980, is how many disjoint pairs must appear in a set system of larger size. Except for the case k=2, solved by Ahlswede and Katona, this problem has remained open for the last three decades. In this paper, we determine the minimum number of disjoint pairs in small k-uniform families, thus confirming a conjecture of Bollobas and Leader…
The balanced hypercube $BH_n$, a variant of the hypercube, was proposed as a desired interconnection network topology. It is known that $BH_n$ is bipartite. Assume that $S=\{s_1,s_2,\cdots,s_{2n-2}\}$ and $T=\{t_1,t_2,\cdots,t_{2n-2}\}$ are any two sets of vertices in different partite sets of $BH_n$ ($n\geq2$). It has been proved that there exists paired 2-disjoint path cover of $BH_n$. In this paper, we prove that there exists unpaired $(2n-2)$-disjoint path cover of $BH_n$ ($n\geq2$) from $S$ to $T$, which improved some known results. The upper bound $2n-2$ of the number of disjoint paths i…
An ordered hypergraph is a hypergraph whose vertex set is linearly ordered, and a convex geometric hypergraph is a hypergraph whose vertex set is cyclically ordered. Extremal problems for ordered and convex geometric graphs have a rich history with applications to a variety of problems in combinatorial geometry. In this paper, we consider analogous extremal problems for uniform hypergraphs, and discover a general partitioning phenomenon which allows us to determine the order of magnitude of the extremal function for various ordered and convex geometric hypergraphs. A special case is the ordere…
A convex geometric hypergraph or cgh consists of a family of subsets of a strictly convex set of points in the plane. There are eight pairwise nonisomorphic cgh's consisting of two disjoint triples. These were studied at length by Braß (2004) and by Aronov, Dujmović, Morin, Ooms, and da Silveira (2019). We determine the extremal functions exactly for seven of the eight configurations. The above results are about cyclically ordered hypergraphs. We extend some of them for triangle systems with vertices from a non-convex set. We also solve problems posed by P. Frankl, Holmsen and Kupavskii (2020)…
