28 research outputs found
Vertex covering with monochromatic pieces of few colours
In 1995, Erd\H{o}s and Gy\'arf\'as proved that in every -colouring of the
edges of , there is a vertex cover by monochromatic paths of
the same colour, which is optimal up to a constant factor. The main goal of
this paper is to study the natural multi-colour generalization of this problem:
given two positive integers , what is the smallest number
such that in every colouring of the edges of with
colours, there exists a vertex cover of by
monochromatic paths using altogether at most different colours? For fixed
integers and as , we prove that , where is the chromatic number of
the Kneser gr aph . More generally, if one replaces by
an arbitrary -vertex graph with fixed independence number , then we
have , where this time around is the
chromatic number of the Kneser hypergraph . This
result is tight in the sense that there exist graphs with independence number
for which . This is in sharp
contrast to the case , where it follows from a result of S\'ark\"ozy
(2012) that depends only on and , but not on
the number of vertices. We obtain similar results for the situation where
instead of using paths, one wants to cover a graph with bounded independence
number by monochromatic cycles, or a complete graph by monochromatic
-regular graphs
Monochromatic cycle covers in random graphs
A classic result of Erd\H{o}s, Gy\'arf\'as and Pyber states that for every
coloring of the edges of with colors, there is a cover of its vertex
set by at most vertex-disjoint monochromatic cycles. In
particular, the minimum number of such covering cycles does not depend on the
size of but only on the number of colors. We initiate the study of this
phenomena in the case where is replaced by the random graph . Given a fixed integer and , we
show that with high probability the random graph has
the property that for every -coloring of the edges of , there is a
collection of monochromatic cycles covering all the
vertices of . Our bound on is close to optimal in the following sense:
if , then with high probability there are colorings of
such that the number of monochromatic cycles needed to
cover all vertices of grows with .Comment: 24 pages, 1 figure (minor changes, added figure