Threshold phenomena in random graphs

In the 1950s, random graphs appeared for the first time in a result of the prolific hungarian mathematician Pál Erd\H{o}s. Since then, interest in random graph theory has only grown up until now. In its first stages, the basis of its theory were set, while they were mainly used in probability and combinatorics theory. However, with the new century and the boom of technologies like the World Wide Web, random graphs are even more important since they are extremely useful to handle problems in fields like network and communication theory. Because of this fact, nowadays random graphs are widely studied by the mathematical community around the world and new promising results have been recently achieved, showing an exciting future for this field. In this bachelor thesis, we focus our study on the threshold phenomena for graph properties within random graphs

Local resilience and Hamiltonicity Maker-Breaker games in random-regular graphs

For an increasing monotone graph property \mP the \emph{local resilience} of a graph $G$ with respect to \mP is the minimal $r$ for which there exists of a subgraph $H\subseteq G$ with all degrees at most $r$ such that the removal of the edges of $H$ from $G$ creates a graph that does not possesses \mP. This notion, which was implicitly studied for some ad-hoc properties, was recently treated in a more systematic way in a paper by Sudakov and Vu. Most research conducted with respect to this distance notion focused on the Binomial random graph model \GNP and some families of pseudo-random graphs with respect to several graph properties such as containing a perfect matching and being Hamiltonian, to name a few. In this paper we continue to explore the local resilience notion, but turn our attention to random and pseudo-random \emph{regular} graphs of constant degree. We investigate the local resilience of the typical random $d$-regular graph with respect to edge and vertex connectivity, containing a perfect matching, and being Hamiltonian. In particular we prove that for every positive $\epsilon$ and large enough values of $d$ with high probability the local resilience of the random $d$-regular graph, \GND, with respect to being Hamiltonian is at least $(1-\epsilon)d/6$. We also prove that for the Binomial random graph model \GNP, for every positive $\epsilon>0$ and large enough values of $K$, if $p>\frac{K\ln n}{n}$ then with high probability the local resilience of \GNP with respect to being Hamiltonian is at least $(1-\epsilon)np/6$. Finally, we apply similar techniques to Positional Games and prove that if $d$ is large enough then with high probability a typical random $d$-regular graph $G$ is such that in the unbiased Maker-Breaker game played on the edges of $G$, Maker has a winning strategy to create a Hamilton cycle.Comment: 34 pages. 1 figur

Degree-3 Treewidth Sparsifiers

We study treewidth sparsifiers. Informally, given a graph $G$ of treewidth $k$, a treewidth sparsifier $H$ is a minor of $G$, whose treewidth is close to $k$, $|V(H)|$ is small, and the maximum vertex degree in $H$ is bounded. Treewidth sparsifiers of degree $3$ are of particular interest, as routing on node-disjoint paths, and computing minors seems easier in sub-cubic graphs than in general graphs. In this paper we describe an algorithm that, given a graph $G$ of treewidth $k$, computes a topological minor $H$ of $G$ such that (i) the treewidth of $H$ is $\Omega(k/\text{polylog}(k))$; (ii) $|V(H)| = O(k^4)$; and (iii) the maximum vertex degree in $H$ is $3$. The running time of the algorithm is polynomial in $|V(G)|$ and $k$. Our result is in contrast to the known fact that unless $NP \subseteq coNP/{\sf poly}$, treewidth does not admit polynomial-size kernels. One of our key technical tools, which is of independent interest, is a construction of a small minor that preserves node-disjoint routability between two pairs of vertex subsets. This is closely related to the open question of computing small good-quality vertex-cut sparsifiers that are also minors of the original graph.Comment: Extended abstract to appear in Proceedings of ACM-SIAM SODA 201

Small Complete Minors Above the Extremal Edge Density

A fundamental result of Mader from 1972 asserts that a graph of high average degree contains a highly connected subgraph with roughly the same average degree. We prove a lemma showing that one can strengthen Mader's result by replacing the notion of high connectivity by the notion of vertex expansion. Another well known result in graph theory states that for every integer t there is a smallest real c(t) so that every n-vertex graph with c(t)n edges contains a K_t-minor. Fiorini, Joret, Theis and Wood conjectured that if an n-vertex graph G has (c(t)+\epsilon)n edges then G contains a K_t-minor of order at most C(\epsilon)log n. We use our extension of Mader's theorem to prove that such a graph G must contain a K_t-minor of order at most C(\epsilon)log n loglog n. Known constructions of graphs with high girth show that this result is tight up to the loglog n factor