English

Growing balanced covering sets

Combinatorics 2021-07-13 v4

Abstract

Given a bipartite graph with bipartition (A,B)(A,B) where BB is equipartitioned into k2k\ge2 blocks, can the vertices in AA be picked one by one so that at every step, the picked vertices cover roughly the same number of vertices in each of these blocks? We show that, if each block has cardinality mm, the vertices in BB have the same degree, and each vertex in AA has at most cmcm neighbors in every block where c>0c>0 is a small constant, then there is an ordering v1,,vnv_1,\ldots,v_n of the vertices in AA such that for every j{1,,n}j\in\{1,\ldots,n\}, the numbers of vertices with a neighbor in {v1,,vj}\{v_1,\ldots,v_j\} in every two blocks differ by at most 2(k1)cm\sqrt{2(k-1)c}\cdot m. This is related to a well-known lemma of Steinitz, and partially answers an unpublished question of Scott and Seymour.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2102.10862,
  title  = {Growing balanced covering sets},
  author = {Tung H. Nguyen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2102.10862},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

6 pages, final version

R2 v1 2026-06-23T23:23:25.423Z