1,248 research outputs found
Hamilton cycles in graphs and hypergraphs: an extremal perspective
As one of the most fundamental and well-known NP-complete problems, the
Hamilton cycle problem has been the subject of intensive research. Recent
developments in the area have highlighted the crucial role played by the
notions of expansion and quasi-randomness. These concepts and other recent
techniques have led to the solution of several long-standing problems in the
area. New aspects have also emerged, such as resilience, robustness and the
study of Hamilton cycles in hypergraphs. We survey these developments and
highlight open problems, with an emphasis on extremal and probabilistic
approaches.Comment: to appear in the Proceedings of the ICM 2014; due to given page
limits, this final version is slightly shorter than the previous arxiv
versio
Embedding large subgraphs into dense graphs
What conditions ensure that a graph G contains some given spanning subgraph
H? The most famous examples of results of this kind are probably Dirac's
theorem on Hamilton cycles and Tutte's theorem on perfect matchings. Perfect
matchings are generalized by perfect F-packings, where instead of covering all
the vertices of G by disjoint edges, we want to cover G by disjoint copies of a
(small) graph F. It is unlikely that there is a characterization of all graphs
G which contain a perfect F-packing, so as in the case of Dirac's theorem it
makes sense to study conditions on the minimum degree of G which guarantee a
perfect F-packing.
The Regularity lemma of Szemeredi and the Blow-up lemma of Komlos, Sarkozy
and Szemeredi have proved to be powerful tools in attacking such problems and
quite recently, several long-standing problems and conjectures in the area have
been solved using these. In this survey, we give an outline of recent progress
(with our main emphasis on F-packings, Hamiltonicity problems and tree
embeddings) and describe some of the methods involved
Hamilton decompositions of regular expanders: applications
In a recent paper, we showed that every sufficiently large regular digraph G
on n vertices whose degree is linear in n and which is a robust outexpander has
a decomposition into edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles. The main consequence of
this theorem is that every regular tournament on n vertices can be decomposed
into (n-1)/2 edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles, whenever n is sufficiently large.
This verified a conjecture of Kelly from 1968. In this paper, we derive a
number of further consequences of our result on robust outexpanders, the main
ones are the following: (i) an undirected analogue of our result on robust
outexpanders; (ii) best possible bounds on the size of an optimal packing of
edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles in a graph of minimum degree d for a large range
of values for d. (iii) a similar result for digraphs of given minimum
semidegree; (iv) an approximate version of a conjecture of Nash-Williams on
Hamilton decompositions of dense regular graphs; (v) the observation that dense
quasi-random graphs are robust outexpanders; (vi) a verification of the `very
dense' case of a conjecture of Frieze and Krivelevich on packing edge-disjoint
Hamilton cycles in random graphs; (vii) a proof of a conjecture of Erdos on the
size of an optimal packing of edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles in a random
tournament.Comment: final version, to appear in J. Combinatorial Theory
The number of Hamiltonian decompositions of regular graphs
A Hamilton cycle in a graph is a cycle passing through every vertex
of . A Hamiltonian decomposition of is a partition of its edge
set into disjoint Hamilton cycles. One of the oldest results in graph theory is
Walecki's theorem from the 19th century, showing that a complete graph on
an odd number of vertices has a Hamiltonian decomposition. This result was
recently greatly extended by K\"{u}hn and Osthus. They proved that every
-regular -vertex graph with even degree for some fixed
has a Hamiltonian decomposition, provided is sufficiently
large. In this paper we address the natural question of estimating ,
the number of such decompositions of . Our main result is that
. In particular, the number of Hamiltonian
decompositions of is
Hamilton cycles in sparse robustly expanding digraphs
The notion of robust expansion has played a central role in the solution of
several conjectures involving the packing of Hamilton cycles in graphs and
directed graphs. These and other results usually rely on the fact that every
robustly expanding (di)graph with suitably large minimum degree contains a
Hamilton cycle. Previous proofs of this require Szemer\'edi's Regularity Lemma
and so this fact can only be applied to dense, sufficiently large robust
expanders. We give a proof that does not use the Regularity Lemma and, indeed,
we can apply our result to suitable sparse robustly expanding digraphs.Comment: Accepted for publication in The Electronic Journal of Combinatoric
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