arXiv subjects

Freddie Illingworth

Publications and source records attributed to Freddie Illingworth.

34 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Minimum degree stability of $H$-free graphs

Given an $(r + 1)$-chromatic graph $H$, the fundamental edge stability result of Erdős and Simonovits says that all $n$-vertex $H$-free graphs have at most $(1 - 1/r + o(1)) \binom{n}{2}$ edges, and any $H$-free graph with that many edges can be made $r$-partite by deleting $o(n^{2})$ edges. Here we consider a natural variant of this -- the minimum degree stability of $H$-free graphs. In particular, what is the least $c$ such that any $n$-vertex $H$-free graph with minimum degree greater than $cn$ can be made $r$-partite by deleting $o(n^{2})$ edges? We determine this least value for all 3-chromatic $H$ and for very many non-3-colourable $H$ (all those in which one is commonly interested) as well as bounding it for the remainder. This extends the Andrásfai-Erdős-Sós theorem and work of Alon and Sudakov.

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arXiv2023

The chromatic profile of locally bipartite graphs

In 1973, Erdős and Simonovits asked whether every $n$-vertex triangle-free graph with minimum degree greater than $1/3 \cdot n$ is 3-colourable. This question initiated the study of the chromatic profile of triangle-free graphs: for each $k$, what minimum degree guarantees that a triangle-free graph is $k$-colourable. This problem has a rich history which culminated in its complete solution by Brandt and Thomassé. Much less is known about the chromatic profile of $H$-free graphs for general $H$. Triangle-free graphs are exactly those in which each neighbourhood is one-colourable. Locally bipartite graphs, first mentioned by Luczak and Thomassé, are the natural variant of triangle-free graphs in which each neighbourhood is bipartite. Here we study the chromatic profile of locally bipartite graphs. We show that every $n$-vertex locally bipartite graph with minimum degree greater than $4/7 \cdot n$ is 3-colourable ($4/7$ is tight) and with minimum degree greater than $6/11 \cdot n$ is 4-colourable. Although the chromatic profiles of locally bipartite and triangle-free graphs bear some similarities, we will see there are striking differences.

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arXiv2023

The chromatic profile of locally colourable graphs

The classical Andrásfai-Erdős-Sós theorem considers the chromatic number of $K_{r + 1}$-free graphs with large minimum degree, and in the case $r = 2$ says that any $n$-vertex triangle-free graph with minimum degree greater than $2/5 \cdot n$ is bipartite. This began the study of the chromatic profile of triangle-free graphs: for each $k$, what minimum degree guarantees that a triangle-free graph is $k$-colourable? The profile has been extensively studied and was finally determined by Brandt and Thomassé. Triangle-free graphs are exactly those in which each neighbourhood is one-colourable. As a natural variant, Łuczak and Thomassé introduced the notion of a locally bipartite graph in which each neighbourhood is 2-colourable. Here we study the chromatic profile of the family of graphs in which every neighbourhood is $b$-colourable (locally $b$-partite graphs) as well as the family where the common neighbourhood of every $a$-clique is $b$-colourable. Our results include the chromatic thresholds of these families as well as showing that every $n$-vertex locally $b$-partite graph with minimum degree greater than $(1 - 1/(b + 1/7)) \cdot n$ is $(b + 1)$-colourable. Understanding these locally colourable graphs is crucial for extending the Andrásfai-Erdős-Sós theorem to non-complete graphs, which we develop elsewhere.

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arXiv2023

The structure and density of $k$-product-free sets in the free semigroup

The free semigroup $\mathcal{F}$ over a finite alphabet $\mathcal{A}$ is the set of all finite words with letters from $\mathcal{A}$ equipped with the operation of concatenation. A subset $S$ of $\mathcal{F}$ is $k$-product-free if no element of $S$ can be obtained by concatenating $k$ words from $S$, and strongly $k$-product-free if no element of $S$ is a (non-trivial) concatenation of at most $k$ words from $S$. We prove that a $k$-product-free subset of $\mathcal{F}$ has upper Banach density at most $1/ρ(k)$, where $ρ(k) = \min\{\ell \colon \ell \nmid k - 1\}$. We also determine the structure of the extremal $k$-product-free subsets for all $k \notin \{3, 5, 7, 13\}$; a special case of this proves a conjecture of Leader, Letzter, Narayanan, and Walters. We further determine the structure of all strongly $k$-product-free sets with maximum density. Finally, we prove that $k$-product-free subsets of the free group have upper Banach density at most $1/ρ(k)$, which confirms a conjecture of Ortega, Rué, and Serra.

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arXiv2023

Flashes and rainbows in tournaments

Colour the edges of the complete graph with vertex set $\{1, 2, \dotsc, n\}$ with an arbitrary number of colours. What is the smallest integer $f(l,k)$ such that if $n > f(l,k)$ then there must exist a monotone monochromatic path of length $l$ or a monotone rainbow path of length $k$? Lefmann, Rödl, and Thomas conjectured in 1992 that $f(l, k) = l^{k - 1}$ and proved this for $l \ge (3 k)^{2 k}$. We prove the conjecture for $l \geq k^3 (\log k)^{1 + o(1)}$ and establish the general upper bound $f(l, k) \leq k (\log k)^{1 + o(1)} \cdot l^{k - 1}$. This reduces the gap between the best lower and upper bounds from exponential to polynomial in $k$. We also generalise some of these results to the tournament setting.

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arXiv2023

On tree decompositions whose trees are minors

In 2019, Dvořák asked whether every connected graph $G$ has a tree decomposition $(T, \mathcal{B})$ so that $T$ is a subgraph of $G$ and the width of $(T, \mathcal{B})$ is bounded by a function of the treewidth of $G$. We prove that this is false, even when $G$ has treewidth $2$ and $T$ is allowed to be a minor of $G$.

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arXiv2023

Reconstructing a point set from a random subset of its pairwise distances

Let $V$ be a set of $n$ points on the real line. Suppose that each pairwise distance is known independently with probability $p$. How much of $V$ can be reconstructed up to isometry? We prove that $p = (\log n)/n$ is a sharp threshold for reconstructing all of $V$ which improves a result of Benjamini and Tzalik. This follows from a hitting time result for the random process where the pairwise distances are revealed one-by-one uniformly at random. We also show that $1/n$ is a weak threshold for reconstructing a linear proportion of $V$.

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arXiv2022

Treewidth, Circle Graphs and Circular Drawings

A circle graph is an intersection graph of a set of chords of a circle. We describe the unavoidable induced subgraphs of circle graphs with large treewidth. This includes examples that are far from the `usual suspects'. Our results imply that treewidth and Hadwiger number are linearly tied on the class of circle graphs, and that the unavoidable induced subgraphs of a vertex-minor-closed class with large treewidth are the usual suspects if and only if the class has bounded rank-width. Using the same tools, we also study the treewidth of graphs $G$ that have a circular drawing whose crossing graph is well-behaved in some way. In this setting, we show that if the crossing graph is $K_t$-minor-free, then $G$ has treewidth at most $12t-23$ and has no $K_{2,4t}$-topological minor. On the other hand, we show that there are graphs with arbitrarily large Hadwiger number that have circular drawings whose crossing graphs are $2$-degenerate.

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arXiv2022

Notes on Aharoni's rainbow cycle conjecture

In 2017, Ron Aharoni made the following conjecture about rainbow cycles in edge-coloured graphs: If $G$ is an $n$-vertex graph whose edges are coloured with $n$ colours and each colour class has size at least $r$, then $G$ contains a rainbow cycle of length at most $\lceil \frac{n}{r} \rceil$. One motivation for studying Aharoni's conjecture is that it is a strengthening of the Caccetta-Häggkvist conjecture on digraphs from 1978. In this article, we present a survey of Aharoni's conjecture, including many recent partial results and related conjectures. We also present two new results. Our main new result is for the $r=3$ case of Aharoni's conjecture. We prove that if $G$ is an $n$-vertex graph whose edges are coloured with $n$ colours and each colour class has size at least 3, then $G$ contains a rainbow cycle of length at most $\frac{4n}{9}+7$. We also discuss how our approach might generalise to larger values of $r$.

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arXiv2022

Product structure of graphs with an excluded minor

This paper shows that $K_t$-minor-free (and $K_{s, t}$-minor-free) graphs $G$ are subgraphs of products of a tree-like graph $H$ (of bounded treewidth) and a complete graph $K_m$. Our results include optimal bounds on the treewidth of $H$ and optimal bounds (to within a constant factor) on $m$ in terms of the number of vertices of $G$ and the treewidth of $G$. These results follow from a more general theorem whose corollaries include a strengthening of the celebrated separator theorem of Alon, Seymour, and Thomas [J. Amer. Math. Soc. 1990] and the Planar Graph Product Structure Theorem of Dujmović et al. [J. ACM 2020].

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arXiv2022

Defective Colouring of Hypergraphs

We prove that the vertices of every $(r + 1)$-uniform hypergraph with maximum degree $Δ$ may be coloured with $c(\fracΔ{d + 1})^{1/r}$ colours such that each vertex is in at most $d$ monochromatic edges. This result, which is best possible up to the value of the constant $c$, generalises the classical result of Erdős and Lovász who proved the $d = 0$ case.

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arXiv2022

Product structure of graph classes with bounded treewidth

We show that many graphs with bounded treewidth can be described as subgraphs of the strong product of a graph with smaller treewidth and a bounded-size complete graph. To this end, define the "underlying treewidth" of a graph class $\mathcal{G}$ to be the minimum non-negative integer $c$ such that, for some function $f$, for every graph ${G \in \mathcal{G}}$ there is a graph $H$ with ${\text{tw}(H) \leq c}$ such that $G$ is isomorphic to a subgraph of ${H \boxtimes K_{f(\text{tw}(G))}}$. We introduce disjointed coverings of graphs and show they determine the underlying treewidth of any graph class. Using this result, we prove that the class of planar graphs has underlying treewidth 3; the class of $K_{s,t}$-minor-free graphs has underlying treewidth $s$ (for ${t \geq \max\{s,3\}}$); and the class of $K_t$-minor-free graphs has underlying treewidth ${t-2}$. In general, we prove that a monotone class has bounded underlying treewidth if and only if it excludes some fixed topological minor. We also study the underlying treewidth of graph classes defined by an excluded subgraph or excluded induced subgraph. We show that the class of graphs with no $H$ subgraph has bounded underlying treewidth if and only if every component of $H$ is a subdivided star, and that the class of graphs with no induced $H$ subgraph has bounded underlying treewidth if and only if every component of $H$ is a star.

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arXiv2022

Balancing connected colourings of graphs

We show that the edges of any graph $G$ containing two edge-disjoint spanning trees can be blue/red coloured so that the blue and red graphs are connected and the blue and red degrees at each vertex differ by at most four. This improves a result of Hörsch. We discuss variations of the question for digraphs, infinite graphs and a computational question, and resolve two further questions of Hörsch in the negative.

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arXiv2022

The $χ$-Ramsey problem for triangle-free graphs

In 1967, Erdős asked for the greatest chromatic number, $f(n)$, amongst all $n$-vertex, triangle-free graphs. An observation of Erdős and Hajnal together with Shearer's classical upper bound for the off-diagonal Ramsey number $R(3, t)$ shows that $f(n)$ is at most $(2 \sqrt{2} + o(1)) \sqrt{n/\log n}$. We improve this bound by a factor $\sqrt{2}$, as well as obtaining an analogous bound on the list chromatic number which is tight up to a constant factor. A bound in terms of the number of edges that is similarly tight follows, and these results confirm a conjecture of Cames van Batenburg, de Joannis de Verclos, Kang, and Pirot.

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arXiv2021

A note on induced Turán numbers

Loh, Tait, Timmons and Zhou introduced the notion of induced Turán numbers, defining $\operatorname{ex}(n, \{H, F\text{-ind}\})$ to be the greatest number of edges in an $n$-vertex graph with no copy of $H$ and no induced copy of $F$. Their and subsequent work has focussed on $F$ being a complete bipartite graph. In this short note, we complement this focus by asymptotically determining the induced Turán number whenever $H$ is not bipartite and $F$ is not an independent set nor a complete bipartite graph.

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arXiv2021

Graphs with no induced $K_{2,t}$

Consider a graph $G$ on $n$ vertices with $α\binom{n}{2}$ edges which does not contain an induced $K_{2, t}$ ($t \geqslant 2$). How large does $α$ have to be to ensure that $G$ contains, say, a large clique or some fixed subgraph $H$? We give results for two regimes: for $α$ bounded away from zero and for $α= o(1)$. Our results for $α= o(1)$ are strongly related to the Induced Turán numbers which were recently introduced by Loh, Tait, Timmons and Zhou. For $α$ bounded away from zero, our results can be seen as a generalisation of a result of Gyárfás, Hubenko and Solymosi and more recently Holmsen (whose argument inspired ours).

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