Graph Theory

Graph theory is a rapidly developing area of mathematics. Recent years have seen the development of deep theories, and the increasing importance of methods from other parts of mathematics. The workshop on Graph Theory brought together together a broad range of researchers to discuss some of the major new developments. There were three central themes, each of which has seen striking recent progress: the structure of graphs with forbidden subgraphs; graph minor theory; and applications of the entropy compression method. The workshop featured major talks on current work in these areas, as well as presentations of recent breakthroughs and connections to other areas. There was a particularly exciting selection of longer talks, including presentations on the structure of graphs with forbidden induced subgraphs, embedding simply connected 2-complexes in 3-space, and an announcement of the solution of the well-known Oberwolfach Problem

Rooted structures in graphs: a project on Hadwiger's conjecture, rooted minors, and Tutte cycles

Hadwigers Vermutung ist eine der anspruchsvollsten Vermutungen für Graphentheoretiker und bietet eine weitreichende Verallgemeinerung des Vierfarbensatzes. Ausgehend von dieser offenen Frage der strukturellen Graphentheorie werden gewurzelte Strukturen in Graphen diskutiert. Eine Transversale einer Partition ist definiert als eine Menge, welche genau ein Element aus jeder Menge der Partition enthält und sonst nichts. Für einen Graphen G und eine Teilmenge T seiner Knotenmenge ist ein gewurzelter Minor von G ein Minor, der T als Transversale seiner Taschen enthält. Sei T eine Transversale einer Färbung eines Graphen, sodass es ein System von kanten-disjunkten Wegen zwischen allen Knoten aus T gibt; dann stellt sich die Frage, ob es möglich ist, die Existenz eines vollständigen, in T gewurzelten Minors zu gewährleisten. Diese Frage ist eng mit Hadwigers Vermutung verwoben: Eine positive Antwort würde Hadwigers Vermutung für eindeutig färbbare Graphen bestätigen. In dieser Arbeit wird ebendiese Fragestellung untersucht sowie weitere Konzepte vorgestellt, welche bekannte Ideen der strukturellen Graphentheorie um eine Verwurzelung erweitern. Beispielsweise wird diskutiert, inwiefern hoch zusammenhängende Teilmengen der Knotenmenge einen hoch zusammenhängenden, gewurzelten Minor erzwingen. Zudem werden verschiedene Ideen von Hamiltonizität in planaren und nicht-planaren Graphen behandelt.Hadwiger's Conjecture is one of the most tantalising conjectures for graph theorists and offers a far-reaching generalisation of the Four-Colour-Theorem. Based on this major issue in structural graph theory, this thesis explores rooted structures in graphs. A transversal of a partition is a set which contains exactly one element from each member of the partition and nothing else. Given a graph G and a subset T of its vertex set, a rooted minor of G is a minor such that T is a transversal of its branch set. Assume that a graph has a transversal T of one of its colourings such that there is a system of edge-disjoint paths between all vertices from T; it comes natural to ask whether such graphs contain a minor rooted at T. This question of containment is strongly related to Hadwiger's Conjecture; indeed, a positive answer would prove Hadwiger's Conjecture for uniquely colourable graphs. This thesis studies the aforementioned question and besides, presents several other concepts of attaching rooted relatedness to ideas in structural graph theory. For instance, whether a highly connected subset of the vertex set forces a highly connected rooted minor. Moreover, several ideas of Hamiltonicity in planar and non-planar graphs are discussed

A survey of parameterized algorithms and the complexity of edge modification

The survey is a comprehensive overview of the developing area of parameterized algorithms for graph modification problems. It describes state of the art in kernelization, subexponential algorithms, and parameterized complexity of graph modification. The main focus is on edge modification problems, where the task is to change some adjacencies in a graph to satisfy some required properties. To facilitate further research, we list many open problems in the area.publishedVersio

Graph Partitioning With Input Restrictions

In this thesis we study the computational complexity of a number of graph partitioning problems under a variety of input restrictions. Predominantly, we research problems related to Colouring in the case where the input is limited to hereditary graph classes, graphs of bounded diameter or some combination of the two. In Chapter 2 we demonstrate the dramatic eect that restricting our input to hereditary graph classes can have on the complexity of a decision problem. To do this, we show extreme jumps in the complexity of three problems related to graph colouring between the class of all graphs and every other hereditary graph class. We then consider the problems Colouring and k-Colouring for Hfree graphs of bounded diameter in Chapter 3. A graph class is said to be H-free for some graph H if it contains no induced subgraph isomorphic to H. Similarly, G is said to be H-free for some set of graphs H, if it does not contain any graph in H as an induced subgraph. Here, the set H consists usually of a single cycle or tree but may also contain a number of cycles, for example we give results for graphs of bounded diameter and girth. Chapter 4 is dedicated to three variants of the Colouring problem, Acyclic Colouring, Star Colouring, and Injective Colouring. We give complete or almost complete dichotomies for each of these decision problems restricted to H-free graphs. In Chapter 5 we study these problems, along with three further variants of 3-Colouring, Independent Odd Cycle Transversal, Independent Feedback Vertex Set and Near-Bipartiteness, for H-free graphs of bounded diameter. Finally, Chapter 6 deals with a dierent variety of problems. We study the problems Disjoint Paths and Disjoint Connected Subgraphs for H-free graphs

Longest Path and Cycle Transversal and Gallai Families

A longest path transversal in a graph G is a set of vertices S of G such that every longest path in G has a vertex in S. The longest path transversal number of a graph G is the size of a smallest longest path transversal in G and is denoted lpt(G). Similarly, a longest cycle transversal is a set of vertices S in a graph G such that every longest cycle in G has a vertex in S. The longest cycle transversal number of a graph G is the size of a smallest longest cycle transversal in G and is denoted lct(G). A Gallai family is a family of graphs whose connected members have longest path transversal number 1. In this paper we find several Gallai families and give upper bounds on lpt(G) and lct(G) for general graphs and chordal graphs in terms of |V(G)|

Graph Transversals for Hereditary Graph Classes: a Complexity Perspective

Within the broad field of Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science, the theory of graphs has been of fundamental importance in solving a large number of optimization problems and in modelling real-world situations. In this thesis, we study a topic that covers many aspects of Graph Theory: transversal sets. A transversal set in a graph G is a vertex set that intersects every subgraph of G that belongs to a certain class of graphs. The focus is on vertex cover, feedback vertex set and odd cycle transversal. The decision problems Vertex Cover, Feedback Vertex Set and Odd Cycle Transversal ask, for a given graph G and an integer k, whether there is a corresponding transversal of G of size at most k. These problems are NP-complete in general and our focus is to determine the complexity of the problems when various restrictions are placed on the input, both for the purpose of finding tractable cases and to increase our understanding of the point at which a problem becomes NP-complete. We consider graph classes that are closed under vertex deletion and in particular H-free graphs, i.e. graphs that do not contain a graph H as an induced subgraph. The first chapter is an introduction to the thesis. There we illustrate the motivation of our work and introduce most of the terminology we have used for our research. In the second chapter, we develop a number of structural results for some classes of H-free graphs. The third chapter looks at the Subset Transversal problems: there we prove that Feedback Vertex Set and Odd Cycle Transversal and their subset variants can be solved in polynomial time for both P_4-free and (sP_1+P_3)-free graphs, while for Subset Vertex Cover we show that it can be solved in polynomial time for (sP_1+P_4)-free graphs. The fourth chapter is entirely dedicated to the Connected Vertex Cover problem. The connectivity constraint requires additional proof techniques. We prove this problem can be solved in polynomial time for (sP_1+P_5)-free graphs, even when weights are given to the vertices of the graph. We continue the research on connected transversals in the fifth chapter: we show that Connected Feedback Vertex Set, Connected Odd Cycle Transversal and their extension variants can be solved in polynomial time for both P_4-free and (sP_1+P_3)-free graphs. In the sixth chapter we study the price of independence: can the size of a smallest independent transversal be bounded in terms of the minimum size of a transversal? We establish complete and almost-complete dichotomies which determine for which graph classes such a bound exists and for which cases such a bound is the identity