English

Decomposing graphs into edges and triangles

Combinatorics 2019-04-03 v4

Abstract

We prove the following 30-year old conjecture of Gy\H{o}ri and Tuza: the edges of every nn-vertex graph GG can be decomposed into complete graphs C1,,CC_1,\ldots,C_\ell of orders two and three such that C1++C(1/2+o(1))n2|C_1|+\cdots+|C_\ell|\le (1/2+o(1))n^2. This result implies the asymptotic version of the old result of Erd\H{o}s, Goodman and P\'osa that asserts the existence of such a decomposition with n2/4\ell\le n^2/4.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1710.08486,
  title  = {Decomposing graphs into edges and triangles},
  author = {Daniel Král' and Bernard Lidický and Taísa L. Martins and Yanitsa Pehova},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.08486},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

We present a shorter proof of our main result; the original proof, which can be of independent interest, is contained in versions 1 and 2 of the manuscript. Small fixes suggested by the referee

R2 v1 2026-06-22T22:23:19.176Z