Turán Number of an Induced Complete Bipartite Graph Plus an Odd Cycle

Let k ⩾ 2 be an integer. We show that if s = 2 and t ⩾ 2, or s = t = 3, then the maximum possible number of edges in a C2k+1-free graph containing no induced copy of Ks,t is asymptotically equal to (t − s + 1)1/s(n/2)2−1/s except when k = s = t = 2. This strengthens a result of Allen, Keevash, Sudakov and Verstraëte [1], and answers a question of Loh, Tait, Timmons and Zhou [14]. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 201

The Chromatic Structure of Dense Graphs

This thesis focusses on extremal graph theory, the study of how local constraints on a graph affect its macroscopic structure. We primarily consider the chromatic structure: whether a graph has or is close to having some (low) chromatic number. Chapter 2 is the slight exception. We consider an induced version of the classical Turán problem. Introduced by Loh, Tait, Timmons, and Zhou, the induced Turán number ex(n, {H, F-ind}) is the greatest number of edges in an n-vertex graph with no copy of H and no induced copy of F. We asymptotically determine ex(n, {H, F-ind}) for H not bipartite and F neither an independent set nor a complete bipartite graph. We also improve the upper bound for ex(n, {H, K_{2, t}-ind}) as well as the lower bound for the clique number of graphs that have some fixed edge density and no induced K_{2, t}. The next three chapters form the heart of the thesis. Chapters 3 and 4 consider the Erdős-Simonovits question for locally r-colourable graphs: what are the structure and chromatic number of graphs with large minimum degree and where every neighbourhood is r-colourable? Chapter 3 deals with the locally bipartite case and Chapter 4 with the general case. While the subject of Chapters 3 and 4 is a natural local to global colouring question, it is also essential for determining the minimum degree stability of H-free graphs, the focus of Chapter 5. Given a graph H of chromatic number r + 1, this asks for the minimum degree that guarantees that an H-free graph is close to r-partite. This is analogous to the classical edge stability of Erdős and Simonovits. We also consider the question for the family of graphs to which H is not homomorphic, showing that it has the same answer. Chapter 6 considers sparse analogues of the results of Chapters 3 to 5 obtaining the thresholds at which the sparse problem degenerates away from the dense one. Finally, Chapter 7 considers a chromatic Ramsey problem first posed by Erdős: what is the greatest chromatic number of a triangle-free graph on $n$ vertices or with m edges? We improve the best known bounds and obtain tight (up to a constant factor) bounds for the list chromatic number, answering a question of Cames van Batenburg, de Joannis de Verclos, Kang, and Pirot

The Turán Density of Tight Cycles in Three-Uniform Hypergraphs

The Turán density of an $r$-uniform hypergraph ${\mathcal {H}}$, denoted $\pi ({\mathcal {H}})$, is the limit of the maximum density of an $n$-vertex $r$-uniform hypergraph not containing a copy of ${\mathcal {H}}$, as $n \to \infty$. Denote by ${\mathcal {C}}_{\ell }$ the $3$-uniform tight cycle on $\ell$ vertices. Mubayi and Rödl gave an “iterated blow-up” construction showing that the Turán density of ${\mathcal {C}}_{5}$ is at least $2\sqrt {3} - 3 \approx 0.464$, and this bound is conjectured to be tight. Their construction also does not contain ${\mathcal {C}}_{\ell }$ for larger $\ell$ not divisible by $3$, which suggests that it might be the extremal construction for these hypergraphs as well. Here, we determine the Turán density of ${\mathcal {C}}_{\ell }$ for all large $\ell$ not divisible by $3$, showing that indeed $\pi ({\mathcal {C}}_{\ell }) = 2\sqrt {3} - 3$. To our knowledge, this is the first example of a Turán density being determined where the extremal construction is an iterated blow-up construction. A key component in our proof, which may be of independent interest, is a $3$-uniform analogue of the statement “a graph is bipartite if and only if it does not contain an odd cycle”

On the structure of graphs with forbidden induced substructures

One of the central goals in extremal combinatorics is to understand how the global structure of a combinatorial object, e.g. a graph, hypergraph or set system, is affected by local constraints. In this thesis we are concerned with structural properties of graphs and hypergraphs which locally do not look like some type of forbidden induced pattern. Patterns can be single subgraphs, families of subgraphs, or in the multicolour version colourings or families of colourings of subgraphs. Erdős and Szekeres\u27s quantitative version of Ramsey\u27s theorem asserts that in every $2$-edge-colouring of the complete graph on $n$ vertices there is a monochromatic clique on at least $\frac{1}{2}\log n$ vertices. The famous Erdős-Hajnal conjecture asserts that forbidding fixed colourings on subgraphs ensures much larger monochromatic cliques. The conjecture is open in general, though a few partial results are known. The first part of this thesis will be concerned with different variants of this conjecture: A bipartite variant, a multicolour variant, and an order-size variant for hypergraphs. In the second part of this thesis we focus more on order-size pairs; an order-size pair $(n,e)$ is the family consisting of all graphs of order $n$ and size $e$, i.e. on $n$ vertices with $e$ edges. We consider order-size pairs in different settings: The graph setting, the bipartite setting and the hypergraph setting. In all these settings we investigate the existence of absolutely avoidable pairs, i.e. fixed pairs that are avoided by all order-size pairs with sufficiently large order, and also forcing densities of order-size pairs $(m,f)$, i.e. for $n$ approaching infinity, the limit superior of the fraction of all possible sizes $e$, such that the order-size pair $(n,e)$ does not avoid the pair $(m,f)$

On Ramsey Theory and Slow Bootstrap Percolation

This dissertation concerns two sets of problems in extremal combinatorics. The major part, Chapters 1 to 4, is about Ramsey-type problems for cycles. The shorter second part, Chapter 5, is about a problem in bootstrap percolation. Next, we describe each topic more precisely. Given three graphs G, L1 and L2, we say that G arrows (L1, L2) and write G → (L1, L2), if for every edge-coloring of G by two colors, say 1 and 2, there exists a color i whose color class contains Li as a subgraph. The classical problem in Ramsey theory is the case where G, L1 and L2 are complete graphs; in this case the question is how large the order of G must be (in terms of the orders of L1 andL2) to guarantee that G → (L1, L2). Recently there has been much interest in the case where L1 and L2 are cycles and G is a graph whose minimum degree is large. In the past decade, numerous results have been proved about those problems. We will continue this work and prove two conjectures that have been left open. Our main weapon is Szemeredi\u27s Regularity Lemma.Our second topic is about a rather unusual aspect of the fast expanding theory of bootstrap percolation. Bootstrap percolation on a graph G with parameter r is a cellular automaton modeling the spread of an infection: starting with a set A0, cointained in V(G), of initially infected vertices, define a nested sequence of sets, A0 ⊆ A1 ⊆. . . ⊆ V(G), by the update rule that At+1, the set of vertices infected at time t + 1, is obtained from At by adding to it all vertices with at least r neighbors in At. The initial set A0 percolates if At = V(G) for some t. The minimal such t is the time it takes for A0 to percolate. We prove results about the maximum percolation time on the two-dimensional grid with parameter r = 2

Essentially tight bounds for rainbow cycles in proper edge-colourings

An edge-coloured graph is said to be rainbow if no colour appears more than once. Extremal problems involving rainbow objects have been a focus of much research over the last decade as they capture the essence of a number of interesting problems in a variety of areas. A particularly intensively studied question due to Keevash, Mubayi, Sudakov and Verstra\"ete from 2007 asks for the maximum possible average degree of a properly edge-coloured graph on $n$ vertices without a rainbow cycle. Improving upon a series of earlier bounds, Tomon proved an upper bound of $(\log n)^{2+o(1)}$ for this question. Very recently, Janzer-Sudakov and Kim-Lee-Liu-Tran independently removed the $o(1)$ term in Tomon's bound, showing a bound of $O(\log^2 n)$. We prove an upper bound of $(\log n)^{1+o(1)}$ for this maximum possible average degree when there is no rainbow cycle. Our result is tight up to the $o(1)$ term, and so it essentially resolves this question. In addition, we observe a connection between this problem and several questions in additive number theory, allowing us to extend existing results on these questions for abelian groups to the case of non-abelian groups

Generation of Graph Classes with Efficient Isomorph Rejection

In this thesis, efficient isomorph-free generation of graph classes with the method of generation by canonical construction path(GCCP) is discussed. The method GCCP has been invented by McKay in the 1980s. It is a general method to recursively generate combinatorial objects avoiding isomorphic copies. In the introduction chapter, the method of GCCP is discussed and is compared to other well-known methods of generation. The generation of the class of quartic graphs is used as an example to explain this method. Quartic graphs are simple regular graphs of degree four. The programs, we developed based on GCCP, generate quartic graphs with 18 vertices more than two times as efficiently as the well-known software GENREG does. This thesis also demonstrates how the class of principal graph pairs can be generated exhaustively in an efficient way using the method of GCCP. The definition and importance of principal graph pairs come from the theory of subfactors where each subfactor can be modelled as a principal graph pair. The theory of subfactors has applications in the theory of von Neumann algebras, operator algebras, quantum algebras and Knot theory as well as in design of quantum computers. While it was initially expected that the classification at index 3 + √5 would be very complicated, using GCCP to exhaustively generate principal graph pairs was critical in completing the classification of small index subfactors to index 5¼. The other set of classes of graphs considered in this thesis contains graphs without a given set of cycles. For a given set of graphs, H, the Turán Number of H, ex(n,H), is defined to be the maximum number of edges in a graph on n vertices without a subgraph isomorphic to any graph in H. Denote by EX(n,H), the set of all extremal graphs with respect to n and H, i.e., graphs with n vertices, ex(n,H) edges and no subgraph isomorphic to any graph in H. We consider this problem when H is a set of cycles. New results for ex(n, C) and EX(n, C) are introduced using a set of algorithms based on the method of GCCP. Let K be an arbitrary subset of {C3, C4, C5, . . . , C32}. For given n and a set of cycles, C, these algorithms can be used to calculate ex(n, C) and extremal graphs in Ex(n, C) by recursively extending smaller graphs without any cycle in C where C = K or C = {C3, C5, C7, . . .} ᴜ K and n≤64. These results are considerably in excess of the previous results of the many researchers who worked on similar problems. In the last chapter, a new class of canonical relabellings for graphs, hierarchical canonical labelling, is introduced in which if the vertices of a graph, G, is canonically labelled by {1, . . . , n}, then G\{n} is also canonically labelled. An efficient hierarchical canonical labelling is presented and the application of this labelling in generation of combinatorial objects is discussed