A proof of the rooted tree alternative conjecture

Bonato and Tardif conjectured that the number of isomorphism classes of trees mutually embeddable with a given tree T is either 1 or infinite. We prove the analogue of their conjecture for rooted trees. We also discuss the original conjecture for locally finite trees and state some new conjectures

Defective and Clustered Graph Colouring

Consider the following two ways to colour the vertices of a graph where the requirement that adjacent vertices get distinct colours is relaxed. A colouring has "defect" $d$ if each monochromatic component has maximum degree at most $d$. A colouring has "clustering" $c$ if each monochromatic component has at most $c$ vertices. This paper surveys research on these types of colourings, where the first priority is to minimise the number of colours, with small defect or small clustering as a secondary goal. List colouring variants are also considered. The following graph classes are studied: outerplanar graphs, planar graphs, graphs embeddable in surfaces, graphs with given maximum degree, graphs with given maximum average degree, graphs excluding a given subgraph, graphs with linear crossing number, linklessly or knotlessly embeddable graphs, graphs with given Colin de Verdi\`ere parameter, graphs with given circumference, graphs excluding a fixed graph as an immersion, graphs with given thickness, graphs with given stack- or queue-number, graphs excluding $K_t$ as a minor, graphs excluding $K_{s,t}$ as a minor, and graphs excluding an arbitrary graph $H$ as a minor. Several open problems are discussed.Comment: This is a preliminary version of a dynamic survey to be published in the Electronic Journal of Combinatoric

Invariant subsets of scattered trees. An application to the tree alternative property of Bonato and Tardif

A tree is scattered if no subdivision of the complete binary tree is a subtree. Building on results of Halin, Polat and Sabidussi, we identify four types of subtrees of a scattered tree and a function of the tree into the integers at least one of which is preserved by every embedding. With this result and a result of Tyomkyn, we prove that the tree alternative property conjecture of Bonato and Tardif holds for scattered trees and a conjecture of Tyomkin holds for locally finite scattered trees

Siblings of Direct Sums of Chains

We prove that a countable direct sum of chains has either one, countably many or else continuum many isomorphism classes of siblings. This proves Thomass\'e's conjecture for such structures. Further, we show that a direct sum of chains of any cardinality has one or infinitely many siblings, up to isomorphism.Comment: 15 page

A Proof of the Tree Alternative Conjecture Under the Topological Minor Relation

We prove the Tree Alternative Conjecture for the topological minor relation: letting $[T]$ denote the equivalence class of $T$ under the topological minor relation we show that: $|[T]| = 1$ or $|[T]|\geq \aleph_0$ and $\forall r\in V(T)$, $|[(T,r)]| = 1$ or $|[(T,r)]|\geq \aleph_0$. In particular, by means of curtailing trees, we show that for any tree $T$ with at least one non-simple ray: $|[T]| \geq 2^{\aleph_0}$