arXiv subjects

Béla Bollobás

Publications and source records attributed to Béla Bollobás.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Upper bounds for multicolour Ramsey numbers

The $r$-colour Ramsey number $R_r(k)$ is the minimum $n \in \mathbb{N}$ such that every $r$-colouring of the edges of the complete graph $K_n$ on $n$ vertices contains a monochromatic copy of $K_k$. We prove, for each fixed $r \geqslant 2$, that $$R_r(k) \leqslant e^{-δk} r^{rk}$$ for some constant $δ= δ(r) > 0$ and all sufficiently large $k \in \mathbb{N}$. For each $r \geqslant 3$, this is the first exponential improvement over the upper bound of Erdős and Szekeres from 1935. In the case $r = 2$, it gives a different (and significantly shorter) proof of a recent result of Campos, Griffiths, Morris and Sahasrabudhe.

math.CO↗

arXiv2023

The critical length for growing a droplet

In many interacting particle systems, relaxation to equilibrium is thought to occur via the growth of 'droplets', and it is a question of fundamental importance to determine the critical length at which such droplets appear. In this paper we construct a mechanism for the growth of droplets in an arbitrary finite-range monotone cellular automaton on a $d$-dimensional lattice. Our main application is an upper bound on the critical probability for percolation that is sharp up to a constant factor in the exponent. Our method also provides several crucial tools that we expect to have applications to other interacting particle systems, such as kinetically constrained spin models on $\mathbb{Z}^d$. This is one of three papers that together confirm the Universality Conjecture of Bollobás, Duminil-Copin, Morris and Smith.

math.PR↗

arXiv2022

The structure and number of Erdős covering systems

Introduced by Erdős in 1950, a covering system of the integers is a finite collection of arithmetic progressions whose union is the set $\mathbb{Z}$. Many beautiful questions and conjectures about covering systems have been posed over the past several decades, but until recently little was known about their properties. Most famously, the so-called minimum modulus problem of Erdős was resolved in 2015 by Hough, who proved that in every covering system with distinct moduli, the minimum modulus is at most $10^{16}$. In this paper we answer another question of Erdős, asked in 1952, on the number of minimal covering systems. More precisely, we show that the number of minimal covering systems with exactly $n$ elements is \[ \exp\left( \left(\frac{4\sqrtτ}{3} + o(1)\right) \frac{n^{3/2}}{(\log n)^{1/2}} \right) \] as $n \to \infty$, where \[ τ= \sum_{t = 1}^\infty \left( \log \frac{t+1}{t} \right)^2. \] En route to this counting result, we obtain a structural description of all covering systems that are close to optimal in an appropriate sense.

math.CO↗

arXiv2022

Universality for monotone cellular automata

In this paper we study monotone cellular automata in $d$ dimensions. We develop a general method for bounding the growth of the infected set when the initial configuration is chosen randomly, and then use this method to prove a lower bound on the critical probability for percolation that is sharp up to a constant factor in the exponent for every 'critical' model. This is one of three papers that together confirm the Universality Conjecture of Bollobás, Duminil-Copin, Morris and Smith.

math.PR↗

arXiv2022

Erdős covering systems

A covering system is a finite collection of arithmetic progressions whose union is the set of integers. The study of these objects was initiated by Erdős in 1950, and over the following decades he asked many questions about them. Most famously, he asked whether there exist covering systems with distinct moduli whose minimum modulus is arbitrarily large. This problem was resolved in 2015 by Hough, who showed that in any such system the minimum modulus is at most $10^{16}$. The purpose of this note is to give a gentle exposition of a simpler and stronger variant of Hough's method, which was recently used to answer several other questions about covering systems. We hope that this technique, which we call the distortion method, will have many further applications in other combinatorial settings.

math.CO↗

arXiv2022

Universality for two-dimensional critical cellular automata

We study the class of monotone, two-state, deterministic cellular automata, in which sites are activated (or 'infected') by certain configurations of nearby infected sites. These models have close connections to statistical physics, and several specific examples have been extensively studied in recent years by both mathematicians and physicists. This general setting was first studied only recently, however, by Bollobás, Smith and Uzzell, who showed that the family of all such 'bootstrap percolation' models on $\mathbb{Z}^2$ can be naturally partitioned into three classes, which they termed subcritical, critical and supercritical. In this paper we determine the order of the threshold for percolation (complete occupation) for every critical bootstrap percolation model in two dimensions. This 'universality' theorem includes as special cases results of Aizenman and Lebowitz, Gravner and Griffeath, Mountford, and van Enter and Hulshof, significantly strengthens bounds of Bollobás, Smith and Uzzell, and complements recent work of Balister, Bollobás, Przykucki and Smith on subcritical models.

math.PR↗

arXiv2022

Subcritical monotone cellular automata

We study monotone cellular automata (also known as $\mathcal{U}$-bootstrap percolation) in $\mathbb{Z}^d$ with random initial configurations. Confirming a conjecture of Balister, Bollobás, Przykucki and Smith, who proved the corresponding result in two dimensions, we show that the critical probability is non-zero for all subcritical models.

math.PR↗

arXiv2019

Flat Littlewood Polynomials Exist

We show that there exist absolute constants $Δ> δ> 0$ such that, for all $n \geqslant 2$, there exists a polynomial $P$ of degree $n$, with $\pm 1$ coefficients, such that $$δ\sqrt{n} \leqslant |P(z)| \leqslant Δ\sqrt{n}$$ for all $z\in\mathbb{C}$ with $|z|=1$. This confirms a conjecture of Littlewood from 1966.

math.CA↗

arXiv2019

The Erdős-Selfridge problem with square-free moduli

A covering system is a finite collection of arithmetic progressions whose union is the set of integers. The study of covering systems with distinct moduli was initiated by Erdős in 1950, and over the following decades numerous problems were posed regarding their properties. One particularly notorious question, due to Erdős, asks whether there exist covering systems whose moduli are distinct and all odd. We show that if in addition one assumes the moduli are square-free, then there must be an even modulus.

math.NT↗

arXiv2018

On the Erdős Covering Problem: the density of the uncovered set

Since their introduction by Erdős in 1950, covering systems (that is, finite collections of arithmetic progressions that cover the integers) have been extensively studied, and numerous questions and conjectures have been posed regarding the existence of covering systems with various properties. In particular, Erdős asked if the moduli can be distinct and all arbitrarily large, Erdős and Selfridge asked if the moduli can be distinct and all odd, and Schinzel conjectured that in any covering system there exists a pair of moduli, one of which divides the other. Another beautiful conjecture, proposed by Erdős and Graham in 1980, states that if the moduli are distinct elements of the interval $[n,Cn]$, and $n$ is sufficiently large, then the density of integers uncovered by the union is bounded below by a constant (depending only on $C$). This conjecture was confirmed (in a strong form) by Filaseta, Ford, Konyagin, Pomerance and Yu in 2007, who moreover asked whether the same conclusion holds if the moduli are distinct and sufficiently large, and $\sum_{i=1}^k \frac{1}{d_i} < C$. Although this condition turns out not to be sufficiently strong to imply the desired conclusion, as the main result of this paper we will give an essentially best possible condition which is sufficient. Our method has a number of further applications. Most importantly, we prove the conjecture of Schinzel stated above, which was made in 1967. We moreover give an alternative (somewhat simpler) proof of a breakthrough result of Hough, who resolved Erdős' minimum modulus problem, with an improved bound on the smallest difference. Finally, we make further progress on the problem of Erdős and Selfridge.

math.NT↗

arXiv2018

Nucleation and growth in two dimensions

We consider a dynamical process on a graph $G$, in which vertices are infected (randomly) at a rate which depends on the number of their neighbours that are already infected. This model includes bootstrap percolation and first-passage percolation as its extreme points. We give a precise description of the evolution of this process on the graph $\mathbb{Z}^2$, significantly sharpening results of Dehghanpour and Schonmann. In particular, we determine the typical infection time up to a constant factor for almost all natural values of the parameters, and in a large range we obtain a stronger, sharp threshold.

math.PR↗

arXiv2018

Dense Subgraphs in Random Graphs

For a constant $γ\in[0,1]$ and a graph $G$, let $ω_γ(G)$ be the largest integer $k$ for which there exists a $k$-vertex subgraph of $G$ with at least $γ\binom{k}{2}$ edges. We show that if $0<p<γ<1$ then $ω_γ(G_{n,p})$ is concentrated on a set of two integers. More precisely, with $α(γ,p)=γ\log\fracγ{p}+(1-γ)\log\frac{1-γ}{1-p}$, we show that $ω_γ(G_{n,p})$ is one of the two integers closest to $\frac{2}{α(γ,p)}\big(\log n-\log\log n+\log\frac{eα(γ,p)}{2}\big)+\frac{1}{2}$, with high probability. While this situation parallels that of cliques in random graphs, a new technique is required to handle the more complicated ways in which these "quasi-cliques" may overlap.

math.CO↗

arXiv2017

A note on Linnik's Theorem on quadratic non-residues

We present a short, self-contained, and purely combinatorial proof of Linnik's theorem: for any $\varepsilon > 0$ there exists a constant $C_\varepsilon$ such that for any $N$, there are at most $C_\varepsilon$ primes $p \leqslant N$ such that the least positive quadratic non-residue modulo $p$ exceeds $N^\varepsilon$.

math.NT↗

arXiv2017

Counting dense connected hypergraphs via the probabilistic method

In 1990 Bender, Canfield and McKay gave an asymptotic formula for the number of connected graphs on $[n]=\{1,2,\ldots,n\}$ with $m$ edges, whenever $n\to\infty$ and $n-1\le m=m(n)\le \binom{n}{2}$. We give an asymptotic formula for the number $C_r(n,m)$ of connected $r$-uniform hypergraphs on $[n]$ with $m$ edges, whenever $r\ge 3$ is fixed and $m=m(n)$ with $m/n\to\infty$, i.e., the average degree tends to infinity. This complements recent results of Behrisch, Coja-Oghlan and Kang (the case $m=n/(r-1)+Θ(n)$) and the present authors (the case $m=n/(r-1)+o(n)$, i.e., `nullity' or `excess' $o(n)$). The proof is based on probabilistic methods, and in particular on a bivariate local limit theorem for the number of vertices and edges in the largest component of a certain random hypergraph. The arguments are much simpler than in the sparse case; in particular, we can use `smoothing' techniques to directly prove the local limit theorem, without needing to first prove a central limit theorem.

math.CO↗

arXiv2017

Coalescence on the real line

We study a geometrically constrained coalescence model derived from spin systems. Given two probability distributions $\mathbb{P}_R$ and $\mathbb{P}_B$ on the positive reals with finite means, colour the real line alternately with red and blue intervals so that the lengths of the red intervals have distribution $\mathbb{P}_R$, the lengths of the blue intervals have distribution $\mathbb{P}_B$, and distinct intervals have independent lengths. Now, iteratively update this colouring of the line by coalescing intervals: change the colour of any interval that is surrounded by longer intervals so that these three consecutive intervals subsequently form a single monochromatic interval. We say that a colour (either red or blue) wins if every point of the line is eventually of that colour. Holroyd, in 2011, asked the following question: under what natural conditions on the initial distributions is one of the colours almost surely guaranteed to win? It turns out that the answer to this question can be quite counter-intuitive due to the non-monotone dynamics of the model. In this paper, we investigate various notions of advantage one of the colours might initially possess, and in the course of doing so, we determine which of the two colours emerges victorious for various nontrivial pairs of distributions.

math.PR↗

arXiv2017

Jigsaw percolation on random hypergraphs

The jigsaw percolation process on graphs was introduced by Brummitt, Chatterjee, Dey, and Sivakoff as a model of collaborative solutions of puzzles in social networks. Percolation in this process may be viewed as the joint connectedness of two graphs on a common vertex set. Our aim is to extend a result of Bollobás, Riordan, Slivken, and Smith concerning this process to hypergraphs for a variety of possible definitions of connectedness. In particular, we determine the asymptotic order of the critical threshold probability for percolation when both hypergraphs are chosen binomially at random.

math.CO↗

arXiv2017

Reconstructing random jigsaws

A colouring of the edges of an $n \times n$ grid is said to be \emph{reconstructible} if the colouring is uniquely determined by the multiset of its $n^2$ \emph{tiles}, where the tile corresponding to a vertex of the grid specifies the colours of the edges incident to that vertex in some fixed order. In 2015, Mossel and Ross asked the following question: if the edges of an $n \times n$ grid are coloured independently and uniformly at random using $q=q(n)$ different colours, then is the resulting colouring reconstructible with high probability? From below, Mossel and Ross showed that such a colouring is not reconstructible when $q = o(n^{2/3})$ and from above, Bordenave, Feige and Mossel and Nenadov, Pfister and Steger independently showed, for any fixed $ε> 0$, that such a colouring is reconstructible when $q \ge n^{1+ε}$. Here, we improve on these results and prove the following: there exist absolute constants $C, c > 0$ such that, as $n \to \infty$, the probability that a random colouring as above is reconstructible tends to $1$ if $q \ge Cn$ and to $0$ if $q \le cn$.

math.CO↗

arXiv2017

Line percolation

We study a new geometric bootstrap percolation model, line percolation, on the $d$-dimensional integer grid $[n]^d$. In line percolation with infection parameter $r$, infection spreads from a subset $A\subset [n]^d$ of initially infected lattice points as follows: if there exists an axis-parallel line $L$ with $r$ or more infected lattice points on it, then every lattice point of $[n]^d$ on $L$ gets infected, and we repeat this until the infection can no longer spread. The elements of the set $A$ are usually chosen independently, with some density $p$, and the main question is to determine $p_c(n,r,d)$, the density at which percolation (infection of the entire grid) becomes likely. In this paper, we determine $p_c(n,r,2)$ up to a multiplicative factor of $1+o(1)$ and $p_c(n,r,3)$ up to a multiplicative constant as $n\rightarrow \infty$ for every fixed $r\in \mathbb{N}$. We also determine the size of the minimal percolating sets in all dimensions and for all values of the infection parameter.

math.PR↗