Hamilton cycles in graphs and hypergraphs: an extremal perspective

As one of the most fundamental and well-known NP-complete problems, the Hamilton cycle problem has been the subject of intensive research. Recent developments in the area have highlighted the crucial role played by the notions of expansion and quasi-randomness. These concepts and other recent techniques have led to the solution of several long-standing problems in the area. New aspects have also emerged, such as resilience, robustness and the study of Hamilton cycles in hypergraphs. We survey these developments and highlight open problems, with an emphasis on extremal and probabilistic approaches.Comment: to appear in the Proceedings of the ICM 2014; due to given page limits, this final version is slightly shorter than the previous arxiv versio

Free nilpotent and HH-type Lie algebras. Combinatorial and orthogonal designs

The aim of our paper is to construct pseudo $H$-type algebras from the covering free nilpotent two-step Lie algebra as the quotient algebra by an ideal. We propose an explicit algorithm of construction of such an ideal by making use of a non-degenerate scalar product. Moreover, as a bypass result, we recover the existence of a rational structure on pseudo $H$-type algebras, which implies the existence of lattices on the corresponding pseudo $H$-type Lie groups. Our approach substantially uses combinatorics and reveals the interplay of pseudo $H$-type algebras with combinatorial and orthogonal designs. One of the key tools is the family of Hurwitz-Radon orthogonal matrices

Unsolved Problems in Spectral Graph Theory

Spectral graph theory is a captivating area of graph theory that employs the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of matrices associated with graphs to study them. In this paper, we present a collection of $20$ topics in spectral graph theory, covering a range of open problems and conjectures. Our focus is primarily on the adjacency matrix of graphs, and for each topic, we provide a brief historical overview.Comment: v3, 30 pages, 1 figure, include comments from Clive Elphick, Xiaofeng Gu, William Linz, and Dragan Stevanovi\'c, respectively. Thanks! This paper will be published in Operations Research Transaction

Packing spanning graphs from separable families

Let $\mathcal G$ be a separable family of graphs. Then for all positive constants $\epsilon$ and $\Delta$ and for every sufficiently large integer $n$, every sequence $G_1,\dotsc,G_t\in\mathcal G$ of graphs of order $n$ and maximum degree at most $\Delta$ such that $e(G_1)+\dotsb+e(G_t) \leq (1-\epsilon)\binom{n}{2}$ packs into $K_n$. This improves results of B\"ottcher, Hladk\'y, Piguet, and Taraz when $\mathcal G$ is the class of trees and of Messuti, R\"odl, and Schacht in the case of a general separable family. The result also implies approximate versions of the Oberwolfach problem and of the Tree Packing Conjecture of Gy\'arf\'as (1976) for the case that all trees have maximum degree at most $\Delta$. The proof uses the local resilience of random graphs and a special multi-stage packing procedure

IST Austria Thesis

We present solutions to several problems originating from geometry and discrete mathematics: existence of equipartitions, maps without Tverberg multiple points, and inscribing quadrilaterals. Equivariant obstruction theory is the natural topological approach to these type of questions. However, for the specific problems we consider it had yielded only partial or no results. We get our results by complementing equivariant obstruction theory with other techniques from topology and geometry