Perfect matchings and perfect squares

In 1961, P. W. Kasteleyn enumerated the domino tilings of a 2n x 2n chessboard. His answer was always a square or double a square (we call such a number "squarish"), but he did not provide a combinatorial explanation for this. In the present thesis, we prove by mostly combinatorial arguments that the number of matchings of a large class of graphs with 4-fold rotational symmetry is squarish; our result includes the squarishness of Kasteleyn's domino tilings as a special case and provides a combinatorial interpretation for the square root. We then extend our result to graphs with other rotational symmetries.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/31458/1/0000380.pd

Rainbow matchings and rainbow connectedness

Aharoni and Berger conjectured that every collection of n matchings of size n+1 in a bipartite graph contains a rainbow matching of size n. This conjecture is related to several old conjectures of Ryser, Brualdi, and Stein about transversals in Latin squares. There have been many recent partial results about the Aharoni-Berger Conjecture. The conjecture is known to hold when the matchings are much larger than n + 1. The best bound is currently due to Aharoni, Kotlar, and Ziv who proved the conjecture when the matchings are of size at least 3n/2 + 1. When the matchings are all edge-disjoint and perfect, the best result follows from a theorem of H¨aggkvist and Johansson which implies the conjecture when the matchings have size at least n + o(n). In this paper we show that the conjecture is true when the matchings have size n + o(n) and are all edge-disjoint (but not necessarily perfect). We also give an alternative argument to prove the conjecture when the matchings have size at least φn + o(n) where φ ≈ 1.618 is the Golden Ratio. Our proofs involve studying connectedness in coloured, directed graphs. The notion of connectedness that we introduce is new, and perhaps of independent interest

Decompositions into spanning rainbow structures

A subgraph of an edge-coloured graph is called rainbow if all its edges have distinct colours. The study of rainbow subgraphs goes back more than two hundred years to the work of Euler on Latin squares and has been the focus of extensive research ever since. Euler posed a problem equivalent to finding properly n-edge-coloured complete bipartite graphs Kn,n which can be decomposed into rainbow perfect matchings. While there are proper edge-colourings of Kn,n without even a single rainbow perfect matching, the theme of this paper is to show that with some very weak additional constraints one can find many disjoint rainbow perfect matchings. In particular, we prove that if some fraction of the colour classes have at most (1−o(1))n edges then one can nearly-decompose the edges of Kn,n into edge-disjoint perfect rainbow matchings. As an application of this, we establish in a very strong form a conjecture of Akbari and Alipour and asymptotically prove a conjecture of Barat and Nagy. Both these conjectures concern rainbow perfect matchings in edge-colourings of Kn,n with quadratically many colours. Using our techniques, we also prove a number of results on near-decompositions of graphs into other rainbow structures like Hamiltonian cycles and spanning trees. Most notably, we prove that any properly coloured complete graph can be nearly-decomposed into spanning rainbow trees. This asymptotically proves the Brualdi-Hollingsworth and Kaneko-Kano-Suzuki conjectures which predict that a perfect decomposition should exist under the same assumptions

Snake graphs and continued fractions

This paper is a sequel to our previous work in which we found a combinatorial realization of continued fractions as quotients of the number of perfect matchings of snake graphs. We show how this realization reflects the convergents of the continued fractions as well as the Euclidean division algorithm. We apply our findings to establish results on sums of squares, palindromic continued fractions, Markov numbers and other statements in elementary number theory

Rainbow matchings and rainbow connectedness

Aharoni and Berger conjectured that every bipartite graph which is the union of n matchings of size n + 1 contains a rainbow matching of size n. This conjecture is a generalization of several old conjectures of Ryser, Brualdi, and Stein about transversals in Latin squares. There have been many recent partial results about the Aharoni-Berger Conjecture. In the case when the matchings are much larger than n + 1, the best bound is currently due to Clemens and Ehrenmüller who proved the conjecture when the matchings are of size at least 3n/2 + o(n). When the matchings are all edge-disjoint and perfect, then the best result follows from a theorem of Häggkvist and Johansson which implies the conjecture when the matchings have size at least n + o(n). In this paper we show that the conjecture is true when the matchings have size n + o(n) and are all edge-disjoint (but not necessarily perfect). We also give an alternative argument to prove the conjecture when the matchings have size at least φn+o(n) where φ≈1.618 is the Golden Ratio. Our proofs involve studying connectedness in coloured, directed graphs. The notion of connectedness that we introduce is new, and perhaps of independent interest