8,440 research outputs found
Proof of a conjecture of Graham and Lov\'asz concerning unimodality of coefficients of the distance characteristic polynomial of a tree
We establish a conjecture of Graham and Lov\'asz that the (normalized)
coefficients of the distance characteristic polynomial of a tree are unimodal;
we also prove they are log-concave
Generalized permutation patterns - a short survey
An occurrence of a classical pattern p in a permutation Ļ is a subsequence of Ļ whose letters are in the same relative order (of size) as those in p. In an occurrence of a generalized pattern, some letters of that subsequence may be required to be adjacent in the permutation. Subsets of permutations characterized by the avoidanceāor the prescribed number of occurrencesā of generalized patterns exhibit connections to an enormous variety of other combinatorial structures, some of them apparently deep. We give a short overview of the state of the art for generalized patterns
Near-Optimal Induced Universal Graphs for Bounded Degree Graphs
A graph is an induced universal graph for a family of graphs if every
graph in is a vertex-induced subgraph of . For the family of all
undirected graphs on vertices Alstrup, Kaplan, Thorup, and Zwick [STOC
2015] give an induced universal graph with vertices,
matching a lower bound by Moon [Proc. Glasgow Math. Assoc. 1965].
Let . Improving asymptotically on previous results by
Butler [Graphs and Combinatorics 2009] and Esperet, Arnaud and Ochem [IPL
2008], we give an induced universal graph with vertices for the family of graphs with vertices of maximum degree
. For constant , Butler gives a lower bound of
. For an odd constant , Esperet et al.
and Alon and Capalbo [SODA 2008] give a graph with
vertices. Using their techniques for any
(including constant) even values of gives asymptotically worse bounds than
we present.
For large , i.e. when , the previous best
upper bound was due to Adjiashvili and
Rotbart [ICALP 2014]. We give upper and lower bounds showing that the size is
. Hence the optimal size is
and our construction is within a factor of
from this. The previous results were
larger by at least a factor of .
As a part of the above, proving a conjecture by Esperet et al., we construct
an induced universal graph with vertices for the family of graphs with
max degree . In addition, we give results for acyclic graphs with max degree
and cycle graphs. Our results imply the first labeling schemes that for any
are at most bits from optimal
Virtuous Insightfulness
Insight often strikes us blind; when we arenāt expecting it, we suddenly see a connection that previously eluded usāa kind of āAha!ā experience. People with a propensity to such experiences are regarded as insightful, and insightfulness is a paradigmatic intellectual virtue. Whatās not clear, however, is just what it is in virtue of which being such that these experiences tend to happen to one renders one intellectually virtuous. This paper draws from both virtue epistemology as well as empirical work on the psychology of problem solving and creativity to make some inroads in accounting for insightfulness as an intellectual virtue. Important to the view advanced is that virtuously insightful individuals manifest certain skills which both cultivate insight experiences (even if not by directly bringing them about) and enable such individuals to move in an epistemically responsible way from insight experience to epistemic endorsement
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