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Piotr Micek

Publications and source records attributed to Piotr Micek.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources
arXiv2021

Improved bounds for centered colorings

A vertex coloring $ϕ$ of a graph $G$ is $p$-centered if for every connected subgraph $H$ of $G$ either $ϕ$ uses more than $p$ colors on $H$ or there is a color that appears exactly once on $H$. Centered colorings form one of the families of parameters that allow to capture notions of sparsity of graphs: A class of graphs has bounded expansion if and only if there is a function $f$ such that for every $p\geq1$, every graph in the class admits a $p$-centered coloring using at most $f(p)$ colors. In this paper, we give upper bounds for the maximum number of colors needed in a $p$-centered coloring of graphs from several widely studied graph classes. We show that: (1) planar graphs admit $p$-centered colorings with $\mathcal{O}(p^3\log p)$ colors where the previous bound was $\mathcal{O}(p^{19})$; (2) bounded degree graphs admit $p$-centered colorings with $\mathcal{O}(p)$ colors while it was conjectured that they may require exponential number of colors in $p$; (3) graphs avoiding a fixed graph as a topological minor admit $p$-centered colorings with a polynomial in $p$ number of colors. All these upper bounds imply polynomial algorithms for computing the colorings. Prior to this work there were no non-trivial lower bounds known. We show that: (4) there are graphs of treewidth $t$ that require $\binom{p+t}{t}$ colors in any $p$-centered coloring and this bound matches the upper bound; (5) there are planar graphs that require $Ω(p^2\log p)$ colors in any $p$-centered coloring.

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arXiv2021

Reconfiguring Independent Sets on Interval Graphs

We study reconfiguration of independent sets in interval graphs under the token sliding rule. We show that if two independent sets of size $k$ are reconfigurable in an $n$-vertex interval graph, then there is a reconfiguration sequence of length $\mathcal{O}(k\cdot n^2)$. We also provide a construction in which the shortest reconfiguration sequence is of length $Ω(k^2\cdot n)$. As a counterpart to these results, we also establish that $\textsf{Independent Set Reconfiguration}$ is PSPACE-hard on incomparability graphs, of which interval graphs are a special case.

math.CO↗
arXiv2021

Excluding a ladder

A ladder is a $2 \times k$ grid graph. When does a graph class $\mathcal{C}$ exclude some ladder as a minor? We show that this is the case if and only if all graphs $G$ in $\mathcal{C}$ admit a proper vertex coloring with a bounded number of colors such that for every $2$-connected subgraph $H$ of $G$, there is a color that appears exactly once in $H$. This type of vertex coloring is a relaxation of the notion of centered coloring, where for every connected subgraph $H$ of $G$, there must be a color that appears exactly once in $H$. The minimum number of colors in a centered coloring of $G$ is the treedepth of $G$, and it is known that classes of graphs with bounded treedepth are exactly those that exclude a fixed path as a subgraph, or equivalently, as a minor. In this sense, the structure of graphs excluding a fixed ladder as a minor resembles the structure of graphs without long paths. Another similarity is as follows: It is an easy observation that every connected graph with two vertex-disjoint paths of length $k$ has a path of length $k+1$. We show that every $3$-connected graph which contains as a minor a union of sufficiently many vertex-disjoint copies of a $2 \times k$ grid has a $2 \times (k+1)$ grid minor. Our structural results have applications to poset dimension. We show that posets whose cover graphs exclude a fixed ladder as a minor have bounded dimension. This is a new step towards the goal of understanding which graphs are unavoidable as minors in cover graphs of posets with large dimension.

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arXiv2021

Adjacency Labelling for Planar Graphs (and Beyond)

We show that there exists an adjacency labelling scheme for planar graphs where each vertex of an $n$-vertex planar graph $G$ is assigned a $(1+o(1))\log_2 n$-bit label and the labels of two vertices $u$ and $v$ are sufficient to determine if $uv$ is an edge of $G$. This is optimal up to the lower order term and is the first such asymptotically optimal result. An alternative, but equivalent, interpretation of this result is that, for every $n$, there exists a graph $U_n$ with $n^{1+o(1)}$ vertices such that every $n$-vertex planar graph is an induced subgraph of $U_n$. These results generalize to bounded genus graphs, apex-minor-free graphs, bounded-degree graphs from minor closed families, and $k$-planar graphs.

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arXiv2020

Erdős-Hajnal properties for powers of sparse graphs

We prove that for every nowhere dense class of graphs $\mathcal{C}$, positive integer $d$, and $\varepsilon>0$, the following holds: in every $n$-vertex graph $G$ from $\mathcal{C}$ one can find two disjoint vertex subsets $A,B\subseteq V(G)$ such that $|A|\geq (1/2-\varepsilon)\cdot n$ and $|B|=Ω(n^{1-\varepsilon})$ and either $\operatorname{dist}(a,b)\leq d$ for all $a\in A$ and $b\in B$, or $\operatorname{dist}(a,b)>d$ for all $a\in A$ and $b\in B$. We also show some stronger variants of this statement, including a generalization to the setting of First-Order interpretations of nowhere dense graph classes.

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arXiv2020

Colouring bottomless rectangles and arborescences

We study problems related to colouring bottomless rectangles. One of our main results shows that for any positive integers $m, k$, there is no semi-online algorithm that can $k$-colour bottomless rectangles with disjoint boundaries in increasing order of their top sides, so that any $m$-fold covered point is covered by at least two colours. This is, surprisingly, a corollary of a stronger result for arborescence colourings. Any semi-online colouring algorithm that colours an arborescence in leaf-to-root order with a bounded number of colours produces arbitrarily long monochromatic paths. This is complemented by optimal upper bounds given by simple online colouring algorithms from other directions. Our other main results study configurations of bottomless rectangles in an attempt to improve the \textit{polychromatic $k$-colouring number}, $m_k^*$. We show that for many families of bottomless rectangles, such as unit-width bottomless rectangles, $m_k^*$ is linear in $k$. We also present an improved lower bound for general families: $m_k^* \geq 2k-1$.

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arXiv2020

Planar graphs have bounded queue-number

We show that planar graphs have bounded queue-number, thus proving a conjecture of Heath, Leighton and Rosenberg from 1992. The key to the proof is a new structural tool called layered partitions, and the result that every planar graph has a vertex-partition and a layering, such that each part has a bounded number of vertices in each layer, and the quotient graph has bounded treewidth. This result generalises for graphs of bounded Euler genus. Moreover, we prove that every graph in a minor-closed class has such a layered partition if and only if the class excludes some apex graph. Building on this work and using the graph minor structure theorem, we prove that every proper minor-closed class of graphs has bounded queue-number. Layered partitions have strong connections to other topics, including the following two examples. First, they can be interpreted in terms of strong products. We show that every planar graph is a subgraph of the strong product of a path with some graph of bounded treewidth. Similar statements hold for all proper minor-closed classes. Second, we give a simple proof of the result by DeVos et al. (2004) that graphs in a proper minor-closed class have low treewidth colourings.

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arXiv2020

Seymour's conjecture on 2-connected graphs of large pathwidth

We prove the conjecture of Seymour (1993) that for every apex-forest $H_1$ and outerplanar graph $H_2$ there is an integer $p$ such that every 2-connected graph of pathwidth at least $p$ contains $H_1$ or $H_2$ as a minor. An independent proof was recently obtained by Dang and Thomas.

math.CO↗
arXiv2019

Boolean dimension and tree-width

The dimension is a key measure of complexity of partially ordered sets. Small dimension allows succinct encoding. Indeed if $P$ has dimension $d$, then to know whether $x \leq y$ in $P$ it is enough to check whether $x\leq y$ in each of the $d$ linear extensions of a witnessing realizer. Focusing on the encoding aspect Nešetřil and Pudlák defined a more expressive version of dimension. A poset $P$ has boolean dimension at most $d$ if it is possible to decide whether $x \leq y$ in $P$ by looking at the relative position of $x$ and $y$ in only $d$ permutations of the elements of $P$. We prove that posets with cover graphs of bounded tree-width have bounded boolean dimension. This stays in contrast with the fact that there are posets with cover graphs of tree-width three and arbitrarily large dimension. This result might be a step towards a resolution of the long-standing open problem: Do planar posets have bounded boolean dimension?

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arXiv2019

Planar cubic graphs of small diameter

Cubic planar $n$-vertex graphs with faces of length at most $6$, e.g., fullerene graphs, have diameter in $Ω(\sqrt{n})$. It has been suspected, that a similar result can be shown for cubic planar graphs with faces of bounded length. This note provides a family of cubic planar $n$-vertex graphs with faces of length at most $7$ and diameter in ${O}(\log n)$, thus refuting the above suspicion.

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arXiv2019

Boolean Dimension, Components and Blocks

We investigate the behavior of Boolean dimension with respect to components and blocks. To put our results in context, we note that for Dushnik-Miller dimension, we have that if $\dim(C)\le d$ for every component $C$ of a poset $P$, then $\dim(P)\le \max\{2,d\}$; also if $\dim(B)\le d$ for every block $B$ of a poset $P$, then $\dim(P)\le d+2$. By way of constrast, local dimension is well behaved with respect to components, but not for blocks: if $\text{ldim}(C)\le d$ for every component $C$ of a poset $P$, then $\text{ldim}(P)\le d+2$; however, for every $d\ge 4$, there exists a poset $P$ with $\text{ldim}(P)=d$ and $\dim(B)\le 3$ for every block $B$ of $P$. In this paper we show that Boolean dimension behaves like Dushnik-Miller dimension with respect to both components and blocks: if $\text{bdim}(C)\le d$ for every component $C$ of $P$, then $\text{bdim}(P)\le 2+d+4\cdot2^d$; also if $\text{bdim}(B)\le d$ for every block of $P$, then $\text{bdim}(P)\le 19+d+18\cdot 2^d$.

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arXiv2019

A Note on the Minimum Number of Edges in Hypergraphs with Property O

An oriented $k$-uniform hypergraph is said to have Property O if for every linear order of the vertex set, there is some edge oriented consistently with the linear order. Recently Duffus, Kay and Rödl investigated the minimum number $f(k)$ of edges in a $k$-uniform hypergaph with Property O. They proved that $k! \leq f(k) \leq (k^2 \ln k) k!$, where the upper bound holds for $k$ sufficiently large. In this short note we improve their upper bound by a factor of $k \ln k$, showing that $f(k) \le \left(\lfloor \frac{k}{2} \rfloor +1 \right) k! - \lfloor \frac{k}{2} \rfloor (k-1)!$ for every $k\geq 3$. We also show that their lower bound is not tight. Furthermore, Duffus, Kay and Rödl also studied the minimum number $n(k)$ of vertices in a $k$-uniform hypergaph with Property O. For $k=3$ they showed $n(3) \in \{6,7,8,9\}$, and asked for the precise value of $n(3)$. Here we show $n(3)=6$.

math.CO↗
arXiv2019

Nowhere Dense Graph Classes and Dimension

Nowhere dense graph classes provide one of the least restrictive notions of sparsity for graphs. Several equivalent characterizations of nowhere dense classes have been obtained over the years, using a wide range of combinatorial objects. In this paper we establish a new characterization of nowhere dense classes, in terms of poset dimension: A monotone graph class is nowhere dense if and only if for every $h \geq 1$ and every $ε> 0$, posets of height at most $h$ with $n$ elements and whose cover graphs are in the class have dimension $\mathcal{O}(n^ε)$.

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arXiv2018

The Queue-Number of Posets of Bounded Width or Height

Heath and Pemmaraju conjectured that the queue-number of a poset is bounded by its width and if the poset is planar then also by its height. We show that there are planar posets whose queue-number is larger than their height, refuting the second conjecture. On the other hand, we show that any poset of width $2$ has queue-number at most $2$, thus confirming the first conjecture in the first non-trivial case. Moreover, we improve the previously best known bounds and show that planar posets of width $w$ have queue-number at most $3w-2$ while any planar poset with $0$ and $1$ has queue-number at most its width.

math.CO↗
arXiv2018

Burling graphs, chromatic number, and orthogonal tree-decompositions

A classic result of Asplund and Grünbaum states that intersection graphs of axis-aligned rectangles in the plane are $χ$-bounded. This theorem can be equivalently stated in terms of path-decompositions as follows: There exists a function $f:\mathbb{N}\to\mathbb{N}$ such that every graph that has two path-decompositions such that each bag of the first decomposition intersects each bag of the second in at most $k$ vertices has chromatic number at most $f(k)$. Recently, Dujmović, Joret, Morin, Norin, and Wood asked whether this remains true more generally for two tree-decompositions. In this note we provide a negative answer: There are graphs with arbitrarily large chromatic number for which one can find two tree-decompositions such that each bag of the first decomposition intersects each bag of the second in at most two vertices. Furthermore, this remains true even if one of the two decompositions is restricted to be a path-decomposition. This is shown using a construction of triangle-free graphs with unbounded chromatic number due to Burling, which we believe should be more widely known.

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arXiv2017

On an extremal problem for poset dimension

Let $f(n)$ be the largest integer such that every poset on $n$ elements has a $2$-dimensional subposet on $f(n)$ elements. What is the asymptotics of $f(n)$? It is easy to see that $f(n)\geqslant n^{1/2}$. We improve the best known upper bound and show $f(n)=\mathcal{O}(n^{2/3})$. For higher dimensions, we show $f_d(n)=\mathcal{O}\left(n^\frac{d}{d+1}\right)$, where $f_d(n)$ is the largest integer such that every poset on $n$ elements has a $d$-dimensional subposet on $f_d(n)$ elements.

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arXiv2017

Planar posets have dimension at most linear in their height

We prove that every planar poset $P$ of height $h$ has dimension at most $192h + 96$. This improves on previous exponential bounds and is best possible up to a constant factor. We complement this result with a construction of planar posets of height $h$ and dimension at least $(4/3)h-2$.

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