Generalisation : graphs and colourings

The interaction between practice and theory in mathematics is a central theme. Many mathematical structures and theories result from the formalisation of a real problem. Graph Theory is rich with such examples. The graph structure itself was formalised by Leonard Euler in the quest to solve the problem of the Bridges of Königsberg. Once a structure is formalised, and results are proven, the mathematician seeks to generalise. This can be considered as one of the main praxis in mathematics. The idea of generalisation will be illustrated through graph colouring. This idea also results from a classic problem, in which it was well known by topographers that four colours suffice to colour any map such that no countries sharing a border receive the same colour. The proof of this theorem eluded mathematicians for centuries and was proven in 1976. Generalisation of graphs to hypergraphs, and variations on the colouring theme will be discussed, as well as applications in other disciplines.peer-reviewe

On the expected number of perfect matchings in cubic planar graphs

A well-known conjecture by Lov\'asz and Plummer from the 1970s asserted that a bridgeless cubic graph has exponentially many perfect matchings. It was solved in the affirmative by Esperet et al. (Adv. Math. 2011). On the other hand, Chudnovsky and Seymour (Combinatorica 2012) proved the conjecture in the special case of cubic planar graphs. In our work we consider random bridgeless cubic planar graphs with the uniform distribution on graphs with $n$ vertices. Under this model we show that the expected number of perfect matchings in labeled bridgeless cubic planar graphs is asymptotically $c\gamma^n$, where $c>0$ and $\gamma \sim 1.14196$ is an explicit algebraic number. We also compute the expected number of perfect matchings in (non necessarily bridgeless) cubic planar graphs and provide lower bounds for unlabeled graphs. Our starting point is a correspondence between counting perfect matchings in rooted cubic planar maps and the partition function of the Ising model in rooted triangulations.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figure

Combinatorics and Geometry of Transportation Polytopes: An Update

A transportation polytope consists of all multidimensional arrays or tables of non-negative real numbers that satisfy certain sum conditions on subsets of the entries. They arise naturally in optimization and statistics, and also have interest for discrete mathematics because permutation matrices, latin squares, and magic squares appear naturally as lattice points of these polytopes. In this paper we survey advances on the understanding of the combinatorics and geometry of these polyhedra and include some recent unpublished results on the diameter of graphs of these polytopes. In particular, this is a thirty-year update on the status of a list of open questions last visited in the 1984 book by Yemelichev, Kovalev and Kravtsov and the 1986 survey paper of Vlach.Comment: 35 pages, 13 figure

Milnor numbers of projective hypersurfaces and the chromatic polynomial of graphs

The chromatic polynomial of a graph G counts the number of proper colorings of G. We give an affirmative answer to the conjecture of Read and Rota-Heron-Welsh that the absolute values of the coefficients of the chromatic polynomial form a log-concave sequence. We define a sequence of numerical invariants of projective hypersurfaces analogous to the Milnor number of local analytic hypersurfaces. Then we give a characterization of correspondences between projective spaces up to a positive integer multiple which includes the conjecture on the chromatic polynomial as a special case. As a byproduct of our approach, we obtain an analogue of Kouchnirenko's theorem relating the Milnor number with the Newton polytope.Comment: Improved readability. Final version, to appear in J. Amer. Math. So

On the Spectrum of the Derangement Graph

We derive several interesting formulae for the eigenvalues of the derangement graph and use them to settle affirmatively a conjecture of Ku regarding the least eigenvalue

Implementing Brouwer's database of strongly regular graphs

Andries Brouwer maintains a public database of existence results for strongly regular graphs on $n\leq 1300$ vertices. We implemented most of the infinite families of graphs listed there in the open-source software Sagemath, as well as provided constructions of the "sporadic" cases, to obtain a graph for each set of parameters with known examples. Besides providing a convenient way to verify these existence results from the actual graphs, it also extends the database to higher values of $n$.Comment: 18 pages, LaTe