We study the asymptotic growth rate of the labels of high-degree vertices in weighted recursive graphs (WRGs) when the weights are independent, identically distributed, almost surely bounded random variables, and as a result confirm a conjecture by Lodewijks and Ortgiese (‘The maximal degree in random recursive graphs with random weights’, preprint, 2020). WRGs are a generalisation of the random recursive tree and directed acyclic graph models, in which vertices are assigned vertex-weights and where new vertices attach to $m\in\mathbb{N}$ predecessors, each selected independently with a probability proportional to the vertex-weight of the predecessor. Prior work established the asymptotic growth rate of the maximum degree of the WRG model, and here we show that there exists a critical exponent $\mu_m$ such that the typical label size of the maximum-degree vertex equals $n^{\mu_m(1+o(1))}$ almost surely as n, the size of the graph, tends to infinity. These results extend results on the asymptotic behaviour of the location of the maximum degree, formerly only known for the random recursive tree model, to the more general weighted multigraph case of the WRG model. Moreover, for the weighted recursive tree model, that is, the WRG model with $m=1$, we prove the joint convergence of the rescaled degree and label of high-degree vertices under additional assumptions on the vertex-weight distribution, and also extend results on the growth rate of the maximum degree obtained by Eslava, Lodewijks, and Ortgiese (Stoch. Process. Appl. 158, 2023).

Let $\boldsymbol {k} := (k_1,\ldots ,k_s)$ be a sequence of natural numbers. For a graph G, let $F(G;\boldsymbol {k})$ denote the number of colourings of the edges of G with colours $1,\dots ,s$ such that, for every $c \in \{1,\dots ,s\}$, the edges of colour c contain no clique of order $k_c$. Write $F(n;\boldsymbol {k})$ to denote the maximum of $F(G;\boldsymbol {k})$ over all graphs G on n vertices. There are currently very few known exact (or asymptotic) results for this problem, posed by Erdős and Rothschild in 1974. We prove some new exact results for $n \to \infty $:

1. (i) A sufficient condition on $\boldsymbol {k}$ which guarantees that every extremal graph is a complete multipartite graph, which systematically recovers all existing exact results.

2. (ii) Addressing the original question of Erdős and Rothschild, in the case $\boldsymbol {k}=(3,\ldots ,3)$ of length $7$, the unique extremal graph is the complete balanced $8$-partite graph, with colourings coming from Hadamard matrices of order $8$.

3. (iii) In the case $\boldsymbol {k}=(k+1,k)$, for which the sufficient condition in (i) does not hold, for $3 \leq k \leq 10$, the unique extremal graph is complete k-partite with one part of size less than k and the other parts as equal in size as possible.

We consider bond percolation on high-dimensional product graphs $G=\square _{i=1}^tG^{(i)}$, where $\square$ denotes the Cartesian product. We call the $G^{(i)}$ the base graphs and the product graph $G$ the host graph. Very recently, Lichev (J. Graph Theory, 99(4):651–670, 2022) showed that, under a mild requirement on the isoperimetric properties of the base graphs, the component structure of the percolated graph $G_p$ undergoes a phase transition when $p$ is around $\frac{1}{d}$, where $d$ is the average degree of the host graph.

In the supercritical regime, we strengthen Lichev’s result by showing that the giant component is in fact unique, with all other components of order $o(|G|)$, and determining the sharp asymptotic order of the giant. Furthermore, we answer two questions posed by Lichev (J. Graph Theory, 99(4):651–670, 2022): firstly, we provide a construction showing that the requirement of bounded degree is necessary for the likely emergence of a linear order component; secondly, we show that the isoperimetric requirement on the base graphs can be, in fact, super-exponentially small in the dimension. Finally, in the subcritical regime, we give an example showing that in the case of irregular high-dimensional product graphs, there can be a polynomially large component with high probability, very much unlike the quantitative behaviour seen in the Erdős-Rényi random graph and in the percolated hypercube, and in fact in any regular high-dimensional product graphs, as shown by the authors in a companion paper (Percolation on high-dimensional product graphs. arXiv:2209.03722, 2022).

The Hoffman ratio bound, Lovász theta function, and Schrijver theta function are classical upper bounds for the independence number of graphs, which are useful in graph theory, extremal combinatorics, and information theory. By using generalized inverses and eigenvalues of graph matrices, we give bounds for independence sets and the independence number of graphs. Our bounds unify the Lovász theta function, Schrijver theta function, and Hoffman-type bounds, and we obtain the necessary and sufficient conditions of graphs attaining these bounds. Our work leads to some simple structural and spectral conditions for determining a maximum independent set, the independence number, the Shannon capacity, and the Lovász theta function of a graph.

We show that many graphs with bounded treewidth can be described as subgraphs of the strong product of a graph with smaller treewidth and a bounded-size complete graph. To this end, define the underlying treewidth of a graph class $\mathcal{G}$ to be the minimum non-negative integer $c$ such that, for some function $f$, for every graph $G \in \mathcal{G}$ there is a graph $H$ with $\textrm{tw}(H) \leqslant c$ such that $G$ is isomorphic to a subgraph of $H \boxtimes K_{f(\textrm{tw}(G))}$. We introduce disjointed coverings of graphs and show they determine the underlying treewidth of any graph class. Using this result, we prove that the class of planar graphs has underlying treewidth $3$; the class of $K_{s,t}$-minor-free graphs has underlying treewidth $s$ (for $t \geqslant \max \{s,3\}$); and the class of $K_t$-minor-free graphs has underlying treewidth $t-2$. In general, we prove that a monotone class has bounded underlying treewidth if and only if it excludes some fixed topological minor. We also study the underlying treewidth of graph classes defined by an excluded subgraph or excluded induced subgraph. We show that the class of graphs with no $H$ subgraph has bounded underlying treewidth if and only if every component of $H$ is a subdivided star, and that the class of graphs with no induced $H$ subgraph has bounded underlying treewidth if and only if every component of $H$ is a star.

We consider the minimum spanning tree problem on a weighted complete bipartite graph $K_{n_R, n_B}$ whose $n=n_R+n_B$ vertices are random, i.i.d. uniformly distributed points in the unit cube in $d$ dimensions and edge weights are the $p$-th power of their Euclidean distance, with $p\gt 0$. In the large $n$ limit with $n_R/n \to \alpha _R$ and $0\lt \alpha _R\lt 1$, we show that the maximum vertex degree of the tree grows logarithmically, in contrast with the classical, non-bipartite, case, where a uniform bound holds depending on $d$ only. Despite this difference, for $p\lt d$, we are able to prove that the total edge costs normalized by the rate $n^{1-p/d}$ converge to a limiting constant that can be represented as a series of integrals, thus extending a classical result of Avram and Bertsimas to the bipartite case and confirming a conjecture of Riva, Caracciolo and Malatesta.

We study the local convergence of critical Galton–Watson trees under various conditionings. We give a sufficient condition, which serves to cover all previous known results, for the convergence in distribution of a conditioned Galton–Watson tree to Kesten’s tree. We also propose a new proof to give the limit in distribution of a critical Galton–Watson tree, with finite support, conditioned on having a large width.

Given a fixed graph $H$ and a constant $c \in [0,1]$, we can ask what graphs $G$ with edge density $c$ asymptotically maximise the homomorphism density of $H$ in $G$. For all $H$ for which this problem has been solved, the maximum is always asymptotically attained on one of two kinds of graphs: the quasi-star or the quasi-clique. We show that for any $H$ the maximising $G$ is asymptotically a threshold graph, while the quasi-clique and the quasi-star are the simplest threshold graphs, having only two parts. This result gives us a unified framework to derive a number of results on graph homomorphism maximisation, some of which were also found quite recently and independently using several different approaches. We show that there exist graphs $H$ and densities $c$ such that the optimising graph $G$ is neither the quasi-star nor the quasi-clique (Day and Sarkar, SIAM J. Discrete Math. 35(1), 294–306, 2021). We also show that for $c$ large enough all graphs $H$ maximise on the quasi-clique (Gerbner et al., J. Graph Theory 96(1), 34–43, 2021), and for any $c \in [0,1]$ the density of $K_{1,2}$ is always maximised on either the quasi-star or the quasi-clique (Ahlswede and Katona, Acta Math. Hung. 32(1–2), 97–120, 1978). Finally, we extend our results to uniform hypergraphs.

The independence polynomial originates in statistical physics as the partition function of the hard-core model. The location of the complex zeros of the polynomial is related to phase transitions, and plays an important role in the design of efficient algorithms to approximately compute evaluations of the polynomial.

In this paper we directly relate the location of the complex zeros of the independence polynomial to computational hardness of approximating evaluations of the independence polynomial. We do this by moreover relating the location of zeros to chaotic behaviour of a naturally associated family of rational functions; the occupation ratios.

The well-known Erdős-Hajnal conjecture states that for any graph $F$, there exists $\epsilon \gt 0$ such that every $n$-vertex graph $G$ that contains no induced copy of $F$ has a homogeneous set of size at least $n^{\epsilon }$. We consider a variant of the Erdős-Hajnal problem for hypergraphs where we forbid a family of hypergraphs described by their orders and sizes. For graphs, we observe that if we forbid induced subgraphs on $m$ vertices and $f$ edges for any positive $m$ and $0\leq f \leq \binom{m}{2}$, then we obtain large homogeneous sets. For triple systems, in the first nontrivial case $m=4$, for every $S \subseteq \{0,1,2,3,4\}$, we give bounds on the minimum size of a homogeneous set in a triple system where the number of edges spanned by every four vertices is not in $S$. In most cases the bounds are essentially tight. We also determine, for all $S$, whether the growth rate is polynomial or polylogarithmic. Some open problems remain.

We show that for any $\varepsilon \gt 0$ and $\Delta \in \mathbb{N}$, there exists $\alpha \gt 0$ such that for sufficiently large $n$, every $n$-vertex graph $G$ satisfying that $\delta (G)\geq \varepsilon n$ and $e(X, Y)\gt 0$ for every pair of disjoint vertex sets $X, Y\subseteq V(G)$ of size $\alpha n$ contains all spanning trees with maximum degree at most $\Delta$. This strengthens a result of Böttcher, Han, Kohayakawa, Montgomery, Parczyk, and Person.

A collection of graphs is nearly disjoint if every pair of them intersects in at most one vertex. We prove that if $G_1, \dots, G_m$ are nearly disjoint graphs of maximum degree at most $D$, then the following holds. For every fixed $C$, if each vertex $v \in \bigcup _{i=1}^m V(G_i)$ is contained in at most $C$ of the graphs $G_1, \dots, G_m$, then the (list) chromatic number of $\bigcup _{i=1}^m G_i$ is at most $D + o(D)$. This result confirms a special case of a conjecture of Vu and generalizes Kahn’s bound on the list chromatic index of linear uniform hypergraphs of bounded maximum degree. In fact, this result holds for the correspondence (or DP) chromatic number and thus implies a recent result of Molloy and Postle, and we derive this result from a more general list colouring result in the setting of ‘colour degrees’ that also implies a result of Reed and Sudakov.

To every finite metric space X, including all connected unweighted graphs with the minimum edge-distance metric, we attach an invariant that we call its blowup-polynomial $p_X(\{ n_x : x \in X \})$. This is obtained from the blowup $X[\mathbf {n}]$ – which contains $n_x$ copies of each point x – by computing the determinant of the distance matrix of $X[\mathbf {n}]$ and removing an exponential factor. We prove that as a function of the sizes $n_x$, $p_X(\mathbf {n})$ is a polynomial, is multi-affine, and is real-stable. This naturally associates a hitherto unstudied delta-matroid to each metric space X; we produce another novel delta-matroid for each tree, which interestingly does not generalize to all graphs. We next specialize to the case of $X = G$ a connected unweighted graph – so $p_G$ is “partially symmetric” in $\{ n_v : v \in V(G) \}$ – and show three further results: (a) We show that the polynomial $p_G$ is indeed a graph invariant, in that $p_G$ and its symmetries recover the graph G and its isometries, respectively. (b) We show that the univariate specialization $u_G(x) := p_G(x,\dots ,x)$ is a transform of the characteristic polynomial of the distance matrix $D_G$; this connects the blowup-polynomial of G to the well-studied “distance spectrum” of G. (c) We obtain a novel characterization of complete multipartite graphs, as precisely those for which the “homogenization at $-1$” of $p_G(\mathbf { n})$ is real-stable (equivalently, Lorentzian, or strongly/completely log-concave), if and only if the normalization of $p_G(-\mathbf { n})$ is strongly Rayleigh.

In 2003, Bohman, Frieze, and Martin initiated the study of randomly perturbed graphs and digraphs. For digraphs, they showed that for every $\alpha \gt 0$, there exists a constant $C$ such that for every $n$-vertex digraph of minimum semi-degree at least $\alpha n$, if one adds $Cn$ random edges then asymptotically almost surely the resulting digraph contains a consistently oriented Hamilton cycle. We generalize their result, showing that the hypothesis of this theorem actually asymptotically almost surely ensures the existence of every orientation of a cycle of every possible length, simultaneously. Moreover, we prove that we can relax the minimum semi-degree condition to a minimum total degree condition when considering orientations of a cycle that do not contain a large number of vertices of indegree $1$. Our proofs make use of a variant of an absorbing method of Montgomery.

Given a graph $H$, let us denote by $f_\chi (H)$ and $f_\ell (H)$, respectively, the maximum chromatic number and the maximum list chromatic number of $H$-minor-free graphs. Hadwiger’s famous colouring conjecture from 1943 states that $f_\chi (K_t)=t-1$ for every $t \ge 2$. A closely related problem that has received significant attention in the past concerns $f_\ell (K_t)$, for which it is known that $2t-o(t) \le f_\ell (K_t) \le O(t (\!\log \log t)^6)$. Thus, $f_\ell (K_t)$ is bounded away from the conjectured value $t-1$ for $f_\chi (K_t)$ by at least a constant factor. The so-called $H$-Hadwiger’s conjecture, proposed by Seymour, asks to prove that $f_\chi (H)={\textrm{v}}(H)-1$ for a given graph $H$ (which would be implied by Hadwiger’s conjecture).

In this paper, we prove several new lower bounds on $f_\ell (H)$, thus exploring the limits of a list colouring extension of $H$-Hadwiger’s conjecture. Our main results are:

• For every $\varepsilon \gt 0$ and all sufficiently large graphs $H$ we have $f_\ell (H)\ge (1-\varepsilon )({\textrm{v}}(H)+\kappa (H))$, where $\kappa (H)$ denotes the vertex-connectivity of $H$.

• For every $\varepsilon \gt 0$ there exists $C=C(\varepsilon )\gt 0$ such that asymptotically almost every $n$-vertex graph $H$ with $\left \lceil C n\log n\right \rceil$ edges satisfies $f_\ell (H)\ge (2-\varepsilon )n$.

The first result generalizes recent results on complete and complete bipartite graphs and shows that the list chromatic number of $H$-minor-free graphs is separated from the desired value of $({\textrm{v}}(H)-1)$ by a constant factor for all large graphs $H$ of linear connectivity. The second result tells us that for almost all graphs $H$ with superlogarithmic average degree $f_\ell (H)$ is separated from $({\textrm{v}}(H)-1)$ by a constant factor arbitrarily close to $2$. Conceptually these results indicate that the graphs $H$ for which $f_\ell (H)$ is close to the conjectured value $({\textrm{v}}(H)-1)$ for $f_\chi (H)$ are typically rather sparse.

We show that for every $n\in \mathbb N$ and $\log n\le d\lt n$, if a graph $G$ has $N=\Theta (dn)$ vertices and minimum degree $(1+o(1))\frac{N}{2}$, then it contains a spanning subdivision of every $n$-vertex $d$-regular graph.

It is proved that Tutte’s $3$-flow conjecture is true for Cayley graphs on groups of order $8p$ where p is an odd prime.

We study the following rainbow version of subgraph containment problems in a family of (hyper)graphs, which generalizes the classical subgraph containment problems in a single host graph. For a collection $\mathit {\mathbf {G}}=\{G_1, G_2,\ldots , G_{m}\}$ of not necessarily distinct k-graphs on the same vertex set $[n]$, a (sub)graph H on $[n]$ is rainbow if there exists an injection $\varphi : E(H)\rightarrow [m]$, such that $e\in E(G_{\varphi (e)})$ for each $e\in E(H)$. Note that if $|E(H)|=m$, then $\varphi $ is a bijection, and thus H contains exactly one edge from each $G_i$.

Our main results focus on rainbow clique-factors in (hyper)graph systems with minimum d-degree conditions. Specifically, we establish the following:

1. (1) A rainbow analogue of an asymptotical version of the Hajnal–Szemerédi theorem, namely, if $t\mid n$ and $\delta (G_i)\geq (1-\frac {1}{t}+\varepsilon )n$ for each $i\in [\frac {n}{t}\binom {t}{2}]$, then $\mathit {\mathbf {G}}$ contains a rainbow $K_t$-factor;

2. (2) Essentially, a minimum d-degree condition forcing a perfect matching in a k-graph also forces rainbow perfect matchings in k-graph systems for $d\in [k-1]$.

The degree assumptions in both results are asymptotically best possible (although the minimum d-degree condition forcing a perfect matching in a k-graph is in general unknown). For (1), we also discuss two directed versions and a multipartite version. Finally, to establish these results, we in fact provide a general framework to attack this type of problem, which reduces it to subproblems with finitely many colors.

A set of vertices in a graph is a Hamiltonian subset if it induces a subgraph containing a Hamiltonian cycle. Kim, Liu, Sharifzadeh, and Staden proved that for large $d$, among all graphs with minimum degree $d$, $K_{d+1}$ minimises the number of Hamiltonian subsets. We prove a near optimal lower bound that takes also the order and the structure of a graph into account. For many natural graph classes, it provides a much better bound than the extremal one ($\approx 2^{d+1}$). Among others, our bound implies that an $n$-vertex $C_4$-free graph with minimum degree $d$ contains at least $n2^{d^{2-o(1)}}$ Hamiltonian subsets.

We recall several categories of graphs which are useful for describing homotopy-coherent versions of generalised operads (e.g. cyclic operads, modular operads, properads, and so on), and give new, uniform definitions for their morphisms. This allows for straightforward comparisons, and we use this to show that certain free-forgetful adjunctions between categories of generalised operads can be realised at the level of presheaves. This includes adjunctions between operads and cyclic operads, between dioperads and augmented cyclic operads, and between wheeled properads and modular operads.