Problems in Extremal Graph Theory

This dissertation consists of six chapters concerning a variety of topics in extremal graph theory.Chapter 1 is dedicated to the results in the papers with Antnio Giro, Gbor Mszros, and Richard Snyder. We say that a graph is path-pairable if for any pairing of its vertices there exist edge disjoint paths joining the vertices in eachpair. We study the extremal behavior of maximum degree and diameter in some classes of path-pairable graphs. In particular we show that a path-pairable planar graph must have a vertex of linear degree.In Chapter 2 we present a joint work with Antnio Giro and Teeradej Kittipassorn. Given graphs G and H, we say that a graph F is H-saturated in G if F is H-free subgraph of G, but addition of any edge from E(G) to F creates a copy of H. Here we deal with the case when G is a complete k-partite graph with n vertices in each class, and H is a complete graph on r vertices. We prove bounds, which are tight for infinitely many values of k and r, on the minimal number of edges in a H-saturated graph in G, for this choice of G and H, answering questions of Ferrara, Jacobson, Pfender, and Wenger; and generalizing a result of Roberts.Chapter 3 is about a joint paper with Antnio Giro and Teeradej Kittipassorn. A coloring of the vertices of a digraph D is called majority coloring if no vertex of D receives the same color as more than half of its outneighbours. This was introduced by van der Zypen in 2016. Recently, Kreutzer, Oum, Seymour, van der Zypen, and Wood posed a number of problems related to this notion: here we solve several of them.In Chapter 4 we present a joint work with Antnio Giro. We show that given any integer k there exist functions g1(k), g2(k) such that the following holds. For any graph G with maximum degree one can remove fewer than g1(k) ^{1/2} vertices from G so that the remaining graph H has k vertices of the same degree at least (H) g2(k). It is an approximate version of conjecture of Caro and Yuster; and Caro, Lauri, and Zarb, who conjectured that g2(k) = 0.Chapter 5 concerns results obtained together with Kazuhiro Nomoto, Julian Sahasrabudhe, and Richard Snyder. We study a graph parameter, the graph burning number, which is supposed to measure the speed of the spread of contagion in a graph. We prove tight bounds on the graph burning number of some classes of graphs and make a progress towards a conjecture of Bonato, Janssen, and Roshanbin about the upper bound of graph burning number of connected graphs.In Chapter 6 we present a joint work with Teeradej Kittipassorn. We study the set of possible numbers of triangles a graph on a given number of vertices can have. Among other results, we determine the asymptotic behavior of the smallest positive integer m such that there is no graph on n vertices with exactly m copies of a triangle. We also prove similar results when we replace triangle by any fixed connected graph

Uniquely pairable graphs

AbstractThe concept of a k-pairable graph was introduced by Z. Chen [On k-pairable graphs, Discrete Mathematics 287 (2004), 11–15] as an extension of hypercubes and graphs with an antipodal isomorphism. In the present paper we generalize further this concept of a k-pairable graph to the concept of a semi-pairable graph. We prove that a graph is semi-pairable if and only if its prime factor decomposition contains a semi-pairable prime factor or some repeated prime factors. We also introduce a special class of k-pairable graphs which are called uniquely k-pairable graphs. We show that a graph is uniquely pairable if and only if its prime factor decomposition has at least one pairable prime factor, each prime factor is either uniquely pairable or not semi-pairable, and all prime factors which are not semi-pairable are pairwise non-isomorphic. As a corollary we give a characterization of uniquely pairable Cartesian product graphs

Viral RNAs are unusually compact.

A majority of viruses are composed of long single-stranded genomic RNA molecules encapsulated by protein shells with diameters of just a few tens of nanometers. We examine the extent to which these viral RNAs have evolved to be physically compact molecules to facilitate encapsulation. Measurements of equal-length viral, non-viral, coding and non-coding RNAs show viral RNAs to have among the smallest sizes in solution, i.e., the highest gel-electrophoretic mobilities and the smallest hydrodynamic radii. Using graph-theoretical analyses we demonstrate that their sizes correlate with the compactness of branching patterns in predicted secondary structure ensembles. The density of branching is determined by the number and relative positions of 3-helix junctions, and is highly sensitive to the presence of rare higher-order junctions with 4 or more helices. Compact branching arises from a preponderance of base pairing between nucleotides close to each other in the primary sequence. The density of branching represents a degree of freedom optimized by viral RNA genomes in response to the evolutionary pressure to be packaged reliably. Several families of viruses are analyzed to delineate the effects of capsid geometry, size and charge stabilization on the selective pressure for RNA compactness. Compact branching has important implications for RNA folding and viral assembly

ON PATH-PAIRABILITY IN THE CARTESIAN PRODUCT OF GRAPHS

We study the inheritance of path-pairability in the Cartesian product of graphs and prove additive and multiplicative inheritance patterns of pathpairability, depending on the number of vertices in the Cartesian product. We present path-pairable graph families that improve the known upper bound on the minimal maximum degree of a path-pairable graph. Further results and open questions about path-pairability are also presented

Terminal-Pairability in Complete Bipartite Graph of Non-Bipartite Demands

We investigate the terminal-pairability problem in the case when the base graph is a complete bipartite graph, and the demand graph is a (not necessarily bipartite) multigraph on the same vertex set. In computer science, this problem is known as the edge-disjoint paths problem. We improve the lower bound on the maximum value of $\Delta(D)$ which still guarantees that the demand graph $D$ has a realization in $K_{n,n}$. We also solve the extremal problem on the number of edges, i.e., we determine the maximum number of edges which guarantees that a demand graph is realizable in $K_{n,n}$.Comment: 15 pages, draws from arXiv:1702.0431