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J. Pascal Gollin

Publications and source records attributed to J. Pascal Gollin.

33 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Matching variables to equations in infinite linear equation systems

A fundamental result in linear algebra states that if a homogenous linear equation system has only the trivial solution, then there are at most as many variables as equations. We prove the following generalisation of this phenomenon. If a possibly infinite homogenous linear equation system with finitely many variables in each equation has only the trivial solution, then there exists an injection from the variables to the equations that maps each variable to an equation in which it appears.

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Graphs of Linear Growth have Bounded Treewidth

A graph class $\mathcal{G}$ has linear growth if, for each graph $G \in \mathcal{G}$ and every positive integer $r$, every subgraph of $G$ with radius at most $r$ contains $O(r)$ vertices. In this paper, we show that every graph class with linear growth has bounded treewidth.

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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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Disjoint dijoins for classes of dicuts in finite and infinite digraphs

A dicut in a directed graph is a cut for which all of its edges are directed to a common side of the cut. A famous theorem of Lucchesi and Younger states that in every finite digraph the least size of a set of edges meeting every non-empty dicut equals the maximum number of disjoint dicuts in that digraph. Such sets are called dijoins. Woodall conjectured a dual statement. He asked whether the maximum number of disjoint dijoins in a directed graph equals the minimum size of a non-empty dicut. We study a modification of this question where we restrict our attention to certain classes of non-empty dicuts, i.e. whether for a class $\mathfrak{B}$ of dicuts of a directed graph the maximum number of disjoint sets of edges meeting every dicut in $\mathfrak{B}$ equals the size of a minimum dicut in $\mathfrak{B}$. In particular, we verify this questions for nested classes of finite dicuts, for the class of dicuts of minimum size, and for classes of infinite dibonds, and we investigate how this generalised setting relates to a capacitated version of this question.

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Counting cliques in $1$-planar graphs

The problem of maximising the number of cliques among $n$-vertex graphs from various graph classes has received considerable attention. We investigate this problem for the class of $1$-planar graphs where we determine precisely the maximum total number of cliques as well as the maximum number of cliques of any fixed size. We also precisely characterise the extremal graphs for these problems.

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Ubiquity in graphs III: Ubiquity of locally finite graphs with extensive tree-decompositions

A graph $G$ is said to be ubiquitous, if every graph $Γ$ that contains arbitrarily many disjoint $G$-minors automatically contains infinitely many disjoint $G$-minors. The well-known Ubiquity conjecture of Andreae says that every locally finite graph is ubiquitous. In this paper we show that locally finite graphs admitting a certain type of tree-decomposition, which we call an extensive tree-decomposition, are ubiquitous. In particular this includes all locally finite graphs of finite tree-width, and also all locally finite graphs with finitely many ends, all of which have finite degree. It remains an open question whether every locally finite graph admits an extensive tree-decomposition.

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Enlarging vertex-flames in countable digraphs

A rooted digraph is a vertex-flame if for every vertex $v$ there is a set of internally disjoint directed paths from the root to $v$ whose set of terminal edges covers all ingoing edges of $v$. It was shown by Lovász that every finite rooted digraph admits a spanning subdigraph which is a vertex-flame and large, where the latter means that it preserves the local connectivity to each vertex from the root. A structural generalisation of vertex-flames and largeness to infinite digraphs was given by the third author and the analogue of Lovász' result for countable digraphs was shown. We strengthen this result by proving that in every countable rooted digraph each vertex-flame can be extended to a large vertex-flame.

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Obstructions for bounded branch-depth in matroids

DeVos, Kwon, and Oum introduced the concept of branch-depth of matroids as a natural analogue of tree-depth of graphs. They conjectured that a matroid of sufficiently large branch-depth contains the uniform matroid $U_{n,2n}$ or the cycle matroid of a large fan graph as a minor. We prove that matroids with sufficiently large branch-depth either contain the cycle matroid of a large fan graph as a minor or have large branch-width. As a corollary, we prove their conjecture for matroids representable over a fixed finite field and quasi-graphic matroids, where the uniform matroid is not an option.

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On the Infinite Lucchesi-Younger Conjecture I

A dicut in a directed graph is a cut for which all of its edges are directed to a common side of the cut. A famous theorem of Lucchesi and Younger states that in every finite digraph the least size of an edge set meeting every dicut equals the maximum number of disjoint dicuts in that digraph. In this first paper out of a series of two papers, we conjecture a version of this theorem using a more structural description of this min-max property for finite dicuts in infinite digraphs. We show that this conjecture can be reduced to countable digraphs where the underlying undirected graph is $2$-connected, and we prove several special cases of the conjecture.

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A unified half-integral Erdős-Pósa theorem for cycles in graphs labelled by multiple abelian groups

Erdős and Pósa proved in 1965 that there is a duality between the maximum size of a packing of cycles and the minimum size of a vertex set hitting all cycles. Such a duality does not hold if we restrict to odd cycles. However, in 1999, Reed proved an analogue for odd cycles by relaxing packing to half-integral packing. We prove a far-reaching generalisation of the theorem of Reed; if the edges of a graph are labelled by finitely many abelian groups, then there is a duality between the maximum size of a half-integral packing of cycles whose values avoid a fixed finite set for each abelian group and the minimum size of a vertex set hitting all such cycles. A multitude of natural properties of cycles can be encoded in this setting, for example cycles of length at least $\ell$, cycles of length $p$ modulo $q$, cycles intersecting a prescribed set of vertices at least $t$ times, and cycles contained in given $\mathbb{Z}_2$-homology classes in a graph embedded on a fixed surface. Our main result allows us to prove a duality theorem for cycles satisfying a fixed set of finitely many such properties.

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Ubiquity in graphs II: Ubiquity of graphs with nowhere-linear end structure

A graph $G$ is said to be $\preceq$-ubiquitous, where $\preceq$ is the minor relation between graphs, if whenever $Γ$ is a graph with $nG \preceq Γ$ for all $n \in \mathbb{N}$, then one also has $\aleph_0 G \preceq Γ$, where $αG$ is the disjoint union of $α$ many copies of $G$. A well-known conjecture of Andreae is that every locally finite connected graph is $\preceq$-ubiquitous. In this paper we give a sufficient condition on the structure of the ends of a graph~$G$ which implies that $G$ is $\preceq$-ubiquitous. In particular this implies that the full grid is $\preceq$-ubiquitous.

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Characterising $k$-connected sets in infinite graphs

A $k$-connected set in an infinite graph, where $k > 0$ is an integer, is a set of vertices such that any two of its subsets of the same size $\ell \leq k$ can be connected by $\ell$ disjoint paths in the whole graph. We characterise the existence of $k$-connected sets of arbitrary but fixed infinite cardinality via the existence of certain minors and topological minors. We also prove a duality theorem for the existence of such $k$-connected sets: if a graph contains no such $k$-connected set, then it has a tree-decomposition which, whenever it exists, precludes the existence of such a $k$-connected set.

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An analogue of Edmonds' Branching Theorem for infinite digraphs

We extend Edmonds' Branching Theorem to locally finite infinite digraphs. As examples of Oxley or Aharoni and Thomassen show, this cannot be done using ordinary arborescences, whose underlying graphs are trees. Instead we introduce the notion of pseudo-arborescences and prove a corresponding packing result. Finally, we verify some tree-like properties for these objects, but give also an example that their underlying graphs do in general not correspond to topological trees in the Freudenthal compactification of the underlying multigraph of the digraph.

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Representations of infinite tree-sets

Tree sets are abstract structures that can be used to model various tree-shaped objects in combinatorics. Finite tree sets can be represented by finite graph-theoretical trees. We extend this representation theory to infinite tree sets. First we characterise those tree sets that can be represented by tree sets arising from infinite trees; these are precisely those tree sets without a chain of order type ${ω+1}$. Then we introduce and study a topological generalisation of infinite trees which can have limit edges, and show that every infinite tree set can be represented by the tree set admitted by a suitable such tree-like space.

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