Faithful universal graphs for minor-closed classes
Abstract
It was proved by Huynh, Mohar, \v{S}\'amal, Thomassen and Wood in 2021 that any countable graph containing every countable planar graph as a subgraph has an infinite clique minor. We prove a finite, quantitative version of this result: for fixed , if a graph is -minor-free and contains every -vertex planar graph as a subgraph, then has vertices. On the other hand, we construct a polynomial size -minor-free graph containing every -vertex tree as an induced subgraph, and a polynomial size -minor-free graph containing every -vertex -minor-free graph as induced subgraph. This answers several problems raised recently by Bergold, Ir\v{s}i\v{c}, Lauff, Orthaber, Scheucher and Wesolek. We study more generally the order of universal graphs for various classes (of graphs of bounded degree, treedepth, pathwidth, or treewidth), if the universal graphs retain some of the structure of the original class.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2504.19582,
title = {Faithful universal graphs for minor-closed classes},
author = {Paul Bastide and Louis Esperet and Carla Groenland and Claire Hilaire and Clément Rambaud and Alexandra Wesolek},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.19582},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
37 pages. v4: revised version