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53 votes
0 answers
2k views

Does every triangle-free graph with maximum degree at most 6 have a 5-colouring?

A very specific case of Reed's Conjecture Reed's $\omega$,$\Delta$, $\chi$ conjecture proposes that every graph has $\chi \leq \lceil \tfrac 12(\Delta+1+\omega)\rceil$. Here $\chi$ is the chromatic ...
Andrew D. King's user avatar
36 votes
0 answers
2k views

3-colorings of the unit distance graph of $\Bbb R^3$

Let $\Gamma$ be the unit distance graph of $\Bbb R^3$: points $(x,y)$ form an edge if $|x,y|=1$. Let $(A,B,C,D)$ be a unit side rhombus in the plane, with a transcendental diagonal, e.g. $A = (\alpha,...
Igor Pak's user avatar
  • 17k
32 votes
0 answers
3k views

Vertex coloring inherited from perfect matchings (motivated by quantum physics)

Added (19.01.2021): Dustin Mixon wrote a blog post about the question where he reformulated and generalized the question. Added (25.12.2020): I made a youtube video to explain the question in detail. ...
Mario Krenn's user avatar
24 votes
0 answers
760 views

How much of the plane is 4-colorable?

In 1981, Falconer proved that the measurable chromatic number of the plane is at least 5. That is, there are no measurable sets $A_1,A_2,A_3,A_4\subseteq\mathbb{R}^2$, each avoiding unit distances, ...
Dustin G. Mixon's user avatar
24 votes
0 answers
487 views

Is the Poset of Graphs Automorphism-free?

For $n\geq 5$, let $\mathcal {P}_n$ be the set of all isomorphism classes of graphs with n vertices. Give this set the poset structure given by $G \le H$ if and only if $G$ is a subgraph of $H$. Is ...
Wade Hann-Caruthers's user avatar
22 votes
0 answers
550 views

Zero curves of Tutte Polynomials?

There is an extensive theory of the real and complex roots of the chromatic polynomial of a graph, a substantial fraction of this being due to the connections between the chromatic polynomial and a ...
Gordon Royle's user avatar
  • 12.7k
21 votes
0 answers
441 views

Straight-line drawing of regular polyhedra

Find the minimum number of straight lines needed to cover a crossing-free straight-line drawing of the icosahedron $(13\dots 15)$ and of the dodecahedron $(9\dots 10)$ (in the plane). For example, ...
Lviv Scottish Book's user avatar
19 votes
0 answers
625 views

Simpler proofs of certain Ramsey numbers

The reason for the gorgeous simplicity of the classic proofs of $R(3,3)$, $R(4,4)$, $R(3,4)$ and $R(3,5)$ is that essentially all you need is the trivial bound and a picture. But for bigger Ramsey ...
Myshkin's user avatar
  • 17.6k
17 votes
0 answers
512 views

Maximum automorphism group for a 3-connected cubic graph

The following arose as a side issue in a project on graph reconstruction. Problem: Let $a(n)$ be the greatest order of the automorphism group of a 3-connected cubic graph with $n$ vertices. Find a ...
Brendan McKay's user avatar
16 votes
0 answers
1k views

Optimal monotone families for the discrete isoperimetric inequality

Background: the discrete isoperimetric inequality Start with a set $X=\{1,2,...,n\}$ of $n$ elements and the family $2^X$ of all subsets of $X$. For a real number $p$ between zero and one, we consider ...
Gil Kalai's user avatar
  • 24.7k
15 votes
0 answers
899 views

Is every k-edge-connected graph also k-trail-ordered?

This is an old question of Aradhana Narula-Tam and Philip Lin that I think deserves wider circulation. It appeared in Discrete Math. 257 (2002), page 613, but not many people have looked at it and it ...
Timothy Chow's user avatar
  • 82.7k
14 votes
0 answers
1k views

The threshold for a perfect matching in a random subgraph of a regular bipartite graph?

The following question seems very natural. It is a well known consequence of Hall's Theorem that every regular bipartite graph has a perfect matching. Another classical result states that the ...
Zur Luria's user avatar
  • 1,633
14 votes
0 answers
416 views

Monotone embedding of complete binary tree in hypercube

Embedding different graphs, especially binary trees, in the hypercube has a huge literature. However, I could not find anything if we restrict the embedding to be monotone. So I would like to ...
domotorp's user avatar
  • 18.8k
14 votes
0 answers
857 views

A Conjecture About Directed Graphs that are the Union of Two Trees

Let D=(V,E) be a directed graph that is the union of two edge-disjoint directed spanning trees. Suppose that There no subset X of vertices so that there is precisely one directed edge from X to its ...
Gil Kalai's user avatar
  • 24.7k
14 votes
0 answers
522 views

Reconstruction conjecture and partial 2-trees

Reconstruction conjecture says that graphs (with at least three vertices) are determined uniquely by their vertex deleted subgraphs. This conjecture is five decades old. Searching relevant literature,...
Shiva Kintali's user avatar
14 votes
0 answers
457 views

How much must deleting a spanning tree reduce edge-connectivity?

Suppose you have a 100-edge connected graph (e.g. an infrastructure network). You want to delete the edges of a spanning tree, any spanning tree you choose (e.g. to sell a connected subnetwork). What ...
Dave Pritchard's user avatar
13 votes
0 answers
740 views

Is there a weak strong regularity lemma?

A famous strengthening of Szemerédi's regularity lemma, due to Alon, Fischer, Krivelevich and Szegedy, allows one to partition a graph into a bounded number of pieces in such a way that not only are ...
gowers's user avatar
  • 29k
13 votes
0 answers
385 views

Are the zeros of Tutte polynomials dense in $\mathbb C^2$?

For the chromatic polynomials of graphs we have two nice theorems which describe the behavior of their zeros: Thomassen proved that the set of real zeros of all chromatic polynomials is the union of $\...
Gjergji Zaimi's user avatar
13 votes
0 answers
751 views

$\epsilon$-nets with respect to the cut norm

The cut norm $||A||\_C$ of a real matrix $A = (a_{i,j}) \in \mathcal{R}^{n\times n}$ is the maximum over all $I \subseteq [n], J \subseteq [n]$ of the quantity $\left|\sum_{i \in I, j \in J}a_{i,j}\...
Aaron's user avatar
  • 794
13 votes
0 answers
1k views

Finding a chromatic polynomial by polynomial fitting

I would like to find the chromatic polynomial χ for the n by m rook's graph Gn,m for as many values of n and m possible. The rooks graph is also (a) the line graph of the complete bipartite graph ...
Douglas S. Stones's user avatar
12 votes
0 answers
530 views

Finding the diameter of an unknown tree: Is BFS optimal?

I'm interested on the following nice problem that is somewhat standard in CS, but I was surprised on the lack of references on the optimal algorithm to this problem. Ana and Banana plays the ...
Curious's user avatar
  • 63
12 votes
0 answers
267 views

Computing the number of ways to delete vertices sequentially without disconnecting a graph

Given a finite connected graph on $n$ vertices, we are trying to count the number of ways to label the vertices $1$ to $n$ so that deleting them sequentially in that order never disconnects the graph. ...
Dylan Thurston's user avatar
12 votes
0 answers
330 views

The number of labeled pairs of edge disjoint trees and related questions

I wonder what is known on the following: 1) What is the number $T_k(n)$ of $k$-tuples of (pairwise) edge-disjoint trees $(T_1,T_2,\dots, T_k)$ with $n$ labelled vertices? 2) (harder, it seems) What ...
Gil Kalai's user avatar
  • 24.7k
12 votes
0 answers
450 views

Colouring a graph whose edge set is a special union of cliques

I am trying to show that a certain family of graphs can always be properly coloured with at most $6$ colours (where "properly coloured" means that each vertex gets a colour and no edge has both ends ...
Gordon Royle's user avatar
  • 12.7k
12 votes
1 answer
2k views

Hobbled rook tour – Hamiltonian cycle on square grid

Consider a square grid of even side length ($2n \times 2n$). It is easy to see that there must exist a Hamiltonian cycle on the corresponding grid graph. Such a cycle is called balanced if the number ...
John's user avatar
  • 121
12 votes
0 answers
910 views

Hamiltonian cycles and fundamental groups

I'm interested in the interplay between the Hamiltonian cycles of graphs and the compact surfaces they embed in. I was doing some reading on the Lovász conjecture for Cayley graphs, I started noticing ...
Gjergji Zaimi's user avatar
12 votes
0 answers
349 views

Matroids with prescribed independent sets

Let $A$ be a finite set. Let $B$ be a family of subsets of $A$. We are interested in a matroid with a minimum rank such that every element of $B$ is independent. The answer is obvious - a uniform ...
ilyaraz's user avatar
  • 1,791
11 votes
0 answers
195 views

Number of triangle-free graphs with prescribed number of edges

This question is posted from StackExchange since it received no answer there. Let $f(n, e)$ be the number of triangle-free graphs on $n$ vertices and $e$ edges. From empirical evidence, I am motivated ...
abacaba's user avatar
  • 384
11 votes
0 answers
541 views

How to determine the sign for the sum over all simple paths in the graph

$\DeclareMathOperator\perm{perm}\DeclareMathOperator\len{len}$Let $A$ be the adjacency matrix of a tree $T$ for some ordering $v_1,...,v_n$ of the vertices, and let $D=xI-A$ its characteristic ...
CHUAKS's user avatar
  • 1,362
11 votes
0 answers
285 views

Does every finite poset have a rigid endomorphism?

Crossposted on Mathematics. In this post, an order-preserving self-map of a poset $X$ will be called an endomorphism of $X$, and such an endomorphism $f$ will be called rigid if the only automorphism ...
Pierre-Yves Gaillard's user avatar
11 votes
0 answers
228 views

Is there a term for this graph subset?

Suppose $G$ is a (finite) graph which is $k$-vertex colourable (i.e. $\chi(G)\leqslant k$). Suppose $S$ is a set of vertices of $G$ with the following property: If $c:V(G)\rightarrow [k]$ is a vertex ...
JonCC's user avatar
  • 211
11 votes
0 answers
243 views

Is there a Ramsey theory for Kneser graphs?

Ramsey theory for graphs usually studies colorings of the edges of complete graphs. I'm interested whether there are any results about edge-colorings of Kneser graphs. More specifically, I'm most ...
domotorp's user avatar
  • 18.8k
10 votes
0 answers
176 views

Largest number of simple paths between two vertices

Let $G$ be a simple undirected graph, $f(v, u)$ be the number of simple paths between $u$ and $v$ in $G$, $f(G) = \max f(v, u)$ over all pairs of vertices $v, u \in G$. A recent IOI problem utilized ...
Mikhail Tikhomirov's user avatar
10 votes
0 answers
438 views

When does a graph have a minimally strong orientation?

Given an asymmetric relation $A\subseteq V^2$ a digraph $D=(V,A)$ is minimally strong iff $D$ is strongly connected and for all arcs $\alpha\in A$ the digraph $D−\alpha=(V,A\setminus\{\alpha\})$ is ...
Ethan Splaver's user avatar
10 votes
0 answers
722 views

Fractional Matching version of Hall's Marriage theorem

Let $G=(S,T,E)$ be a bipartite graph, $|S|=|T|$. Then the following are equivalent: 1) there exist a perfect matching in $G$; 2) there exist non-negative weights on edges such that the sum of ...
Fedor Petrov's user avatar
10 votes
0 answers
225 views

Cospectral mate of rhombic dodecahedron

I am wondering if the following pair of cospectral graphs was previously known. The rhombic dodecahedron graph looks like this (graph6 string: 'M?????rrAiTOd_YO?'): As far as I know, it was previously ...
David Roberson's user avatar
10 votes
0 answers
222 views

Asymptotics of subgraph densities in graphons

In Pittel (1989)'s solution to a problem of Knuth (1976) on the expected number of stable matchings between $n$ men and $n$ women under uniform random preferences, it was shown that, as $n \to \infty$,...
Yufei Zhao's user avatar
9 votes
0 answers
355 views

Goldberg-Seymour conjecture

I am wondering whether the graph theory community regards the Goldberg-Seymour conjecture as settled. According to the Wikipedia entry on the Goldberg-Seymour conjecture, "In 2019, an alleged ...
James Propp's user avatar
  • 19.7k
9 votes
0 answers
378 views

How many orthogonal matrices (not orthonormal) are there with entries in $\{0,1,−1\}$?

Here by orthogonal matrix I mean just the rows are mutually orthogonal. Two such matrices are equivalent if one can be obtained from the other by permutations of rows and columns, or change of signs ...
Arun 's user avatar
  • 745
9 votes
0 answers
156 views

Minimal number of colours in distinguishing colouring of biconnected graphs

A colouring of edges of a graph is distingushing if no non-identity automorphism of the graph preserves this colouring. Problem. Is it true that each biconnected graph possesses a distinguishing ...
Lviv Scottish Book's user avatar
9 votes
0 answers
188 views

Cycles of length $2^n - 2$ in the De Bruijn graph

It is well known that the number of (cyclic) De Bruijn sequences is $2^{2^{n-1}-n}$. This number may also be interpreted as the number of cycles of length $2^n$ in the De Bruijn graph of order $n$. ...
Timothy Chow's user avatar
  • 82.7k
9 votes
0 answers
499 views

A separation property of graphs of bounded tree-width

The following separation property of trees is well-known and in fact easy to prove (see e.g. the paper "Covering a hypergraph of subgraphs" by Noga Alon, Lemma 2.2) Let $T$ be a tree and $r, m$ non-...
monkeymaths's user avatar
  • 1,169
9 votes
0 answers
245 views

De Bruijn sequence inside De Bruijn sequence

A binary De Bruijn sequence of index $n$ is a circular sequence $S=a_1a_2\ldots a_{2^n}$, with $a_i∈\{0,1\}$, and such that each of the $2^n$ binary $n$-tuples occurs exactly once in $S$. What is ...
Alexey Ustinov's user avatar
9 votes
0 answers
440 views

An extremal problem for graphs having every edge contained in a 4-clique

This is a follow-up to Graphs with many triangles but few complete graphs on 4 vertices I'm looking for an upper bound for the difference between the number of edges and the number of 4-cliques in a ...
Thomas Kalinowski's user avatar
9 votes
0 answers
1k views

Simplicial Representations of (Hyper)Graph Complexes

For graph complexes, which are families of graph [on a fixed number of vertices n] closed under the deletion of edges, there is a natural simplicial complex capturing that information. Specifically, ...
Gwyn Whieldon's user avatar
8 votes
0 answers
507 views

Example of graph with strange property

I've also posted this problem in Math Stack Exchange (here). Note: Whenever I mention a coloring of a graph I'm referring to a proper coloring over its vertices using the least amount of colors. ...
Alma Arjuna's user avatar
8 votes
0 answers
459 views

Extension of Erdős-Gallai (s,t)-path theorem to directed graphs

The following is a result of Erdős-Gallai from 1959 (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02024498): Given a 2-connected undirected unweighted graph with minimum degree at least $d$, for every ...
Nicole Wein's user avatar
8 votes
0 answers
155 views

Partial order on graphs induced by homomorphism counts

For graphs $F$ and $G$, let $\hom(F,G)$ denote the number of homomorphisms (adjacency preserving maps) from $F$ to $G$. Define a relation $\le_{\hom}$ on (isomorphism classes of) graphs as $G \le_{\...
David Roberson's user avatar
8 votes
0 answers
304 views

"Meritocratic" pyramid schemes

There have been a couple of times in my life when people from multi-level marketing organizations attempted to recruit me. I listened to what they had to say, and both times I did not get involved ...
Favst's user avatar
  • 2,075
8 votes
0 answers
232 views

On the structure of maximal Ramsey colorings

For positive integers $a_1,\dots,a_n$, recall that the multicolor Ramsey number $R(a_1,\dots,a_n)$ is the smallest integer $N$ such that if the edges of the complete graph $K_N$ are colored with the $...
Andrés E. Caicedo's user avatar

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