Continuum Cascade Model of Directed Random Graphs: Traveling Wave Analysis

We study a class of directed random graphs. In these graphs, the interval [0,x] is the vertex set, and from each y\in [0,x], directed links are drawn to points in the interval (y,x] which are chosen uniformly with density one. We analyze the length of the longest directed path starting from the origin. In the large x limit, we employ traveling wave techniques to extract the asymptotic behavior of this quantity. We also study the size of a cascade tree composed of vertices which can be reached via directed paths starting at the origin.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures; figure adde

Long induced paths in graphs

We prove that every 3-connected planar graph on $n$ vertices contains an induced path on $\Omega(\log n)$ vertices, which is best possible and improves the best known lower bound by a multiplicative factor of $\log \log n$. We deduce that any planar graph (or more generally, any graph embeddable on a fixed surface) with a path on $n$ vertices, also contains an induced path on $\Omega(\sqrt{\log n})$ vertices. We conjecture that for any $k$, there is a contant $c(k)$ such that any $k$-degenerate graph with a path on $n$ vertices also contains an induced path on $\Omega((\log n)^{c(k)})$ vertices. We provide examples showing that this order of magnitude would be best possible (already for chordal graphs), and prove the conjecture in the case of interval graphs.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figures - revised versio