Extremal and degree donditions for path extendability in digraphs

In the study of cycles and paths, the meta-conjecture of Bondy that sufficient conditions for Hamiltonicity often imply pancyclicity has motivated research on the existence of cycles and paths of many lengths. Hendry further introduced the stronger concepts of cycle extendability and path extendability, which require that every cycle or path can be extended to another one with one additional vertex. These concepts have been studied extensively, but there exist few results on path extendability in digraphs, as far as we know. In this paper, we make the first attempt in this direction. We establish a number of extremal and degree conditions for path extendability in general digraphs. Moreover, we prove that every path of length at least two in a regular tournament is extendable, with some exceptions. One of our proof approaches is a new contraction operation to transform nonextendable paths into nonextendable cycles

How tough is toughness?

The concept of toughness was introduced by Chvátal [34] more than forty years ago. Toughness resembles vertex connectivity, but is different in the sense that it takes into account what the effect of deleting a vertex cut is on the number of resulting components. As we will see, this difference has major consequences in terms of computational complexity and on the implications with respect to cycle structure, in particular the existence of Hamilton cycles and k-factors

Permanents, Pfaffian orientations, and even directed circuits

Given a 0-1 square matrix A, when can some of the 1's be changed to -1's in such a way that the permanent of A equals the determinant of the modified matrix? When does a real square matrix have the property that every real matrix with the same sign pattern (that is, the corresponding entries either have the same sign or are both zero) is nonsingular? When is a hypergraph with n vertices and n hyperedges minimally nonbipartite? When does a bipartite graph have a "Pfaffian orientation"? Given a digraph, does it have no directed circuit of even length? Given a digraph, does it have a subdivision with no even directed circuit? It is known that all of the above problems are equivalent. We prove a structural characterization of the feasible instances, which implies a polynomial-time algorithm to solve all of the above problems. The structural characterization says, roughly speaking, that a bipartite graph has a Pfaffian orientation if and only if it can be obtained by piecing together (in a specified way) planar bipartite graphs and one sporadic nonplanar bipartite graph.Comment: 47 pages, published versio

On several extremal problems in graph theory involving gromov hyperbolicity constant

Mención Internacional en el título de doctorIn this Thesis we study the extremal problems of maximazing and minimazing the hyperbolicity constant on several families of graphs. In order to properly raise our research problem, we need to introduce some important definitions and make some remarks on the graphs we study.Programa Oficial de Doctorado en Ingeniería MatemáticaPresidente: Elena Romera Colmenarejo.- Secretario: Ana María Portilla Ferreira.- Vocal: José María Sigarreta Almir

Subdivisions with Distance Constraints in Large Graphs

In this dissertation we are concerned with sharp degree conditions that guarantee the existence of certain types of subdivisions in large graphs. Of particular interest are subdivisions with a certain number of arbitrarily specified vertices and with prescribed path lengths. Our non-standard approach makes heavy use of the Regularity Lemma (Szemerédi, 1978), the Blow-Up Lemma (Komlós, Sárkózy, and Szemerédi, 1994), and the minimum degree panconnectivity criterion (Williamson, 1977).Sharp minimum degree criteria for a graph G to be H-linked have recently been discovered. We define (H,w,d)-linkage, a condition stronger than H-linkage, by including a weighting function w consisting of required lengths for each edge-path of a desired H-subdivision. We establish sharp minimum degree criteria for a large graph G to be (H,w,d)-linked for all nonnegative d. We similarly define the weaker condition (H,S,w,d)-semi-linkage, where S denotes the set of vertices of H whose corresponding vertices in an H-subdivision are arbitrarily specified. We prove similar sharp minimum degree criteria for a large graph G to be (H,S,w,d)-semi-linked for all nonnegativeWe also examine path coverings in large graphs, which could be seen as a special case of (H,S,w)-semi-linkage. In 2000, Enomoto and Ota conjectured that a graph G of order n with degree sum σ2(G) satisfying σ2(G) \u3e n + k - 2 may be partitioned into k paths, each of prescribed order and with a specified starting vertex. We prove the Enomoto-Ota Conjecture for graphs of sufficiently large order