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

Coloring problems in combinatorics and descriptive set theory

In this dissertation we study problems related to colorings of combinatorial structures both in the “classical” finite context and in the framework of descriptive set theory, with applications to topological dynamics and ergodic theory. This work consists of two parts, each of which is in turn split into a number of chapters. Although the individual chapters are largely independent from each other (with the exception of Chapters 4 and 6, which partially rely on some of the results obtained in Chapter 3), certain common themes feature throughout—most prominently, the use of probabilistic techniques. In Chapter 1, we establish a generalization of the Lovász Local Lemma (a powerful tool in probabilistic combinatorics), which we call the Local Cut Lemma, and apply it to a variety of problems in graph coloring. In Chapter 2, we study DP-coloring (also known as correspondence coloring)—an extension of list coloring that was recently introduced by Dvorák and Postle. The goal of that chapter is to gain some understanding of the similarities and the differences between DP-coloring and list coloring, and we find many instances of both. In Chapter 3, we adapt the Lovász Local Lemma for the needs of descriptive set theory and use it to establish new bounds on measurable chromatic numbers of graphs induced by group actions. In Chapter 4, we study shift actions of countable groups on spaces of the form A, where A is a finite set, and apply the Lovász Local Lemma to find “large” closed shift-invariant subsets X A on which the induced action of is free. In Chapter 5, we establish precise connections between certain problems in graph theory and in descriptive set theory. As a corollary of our general result, we obtain new upper bounds on Baire measurable chromatic numbers from known results in finite combinatorics. Finally, in Chapter 6, we consider the notions of weak containment and weak equivalence of probability measure-preserving actions of a countable group—relations introduced by Kechris that are combinatorial in spirit and involve the way the action interacts with finite colorings of the underlying probability space. This work is based on the following papers and preprints: [Ber16a; Ber16b; Ber16c; Ber17a; Ber17b; Ber17c; Ber18a; Ber18b], [BK16; BK17a] (with Alexandr Kostochka), [BKP17] (with Alexandr Kostochka and Sergei Pron), and [BKZ17; BKZ18] (with Alexandr Kostochka and Xuding Zhu)

Succinct data structures for dynamics strings

A new simple algorithm for optimal embedding of complete binary trees into hypercubes as well as a node-by-node algorithm for embedding of nearly complete binary trees into hypercubes are presented