English

Monotone Paths on Acyclic 3-Regular Graphs

Combinatorics 2025-08-05 v1 Optimization and Control

Abstract

Motivated by trying to understand the behavior of the simplex method, Athanasiadis, De Loera and Zhang provided upper and lower bounds on the number of the monotone paths on 3-polytopes. For simple 3-polytopes with 2n2n vertices, they showed that the number of monotone paths is bounded above by (1+φ)n(1+\varphi)^n, with φ\varphi being the golden ratio. We improve the result and show that for a larger family of graphs the number is bounded above by c1.6779nc \cdot 1.6779^n for some universal constant cc. Meanwhile, the best known construction and conjectured extremizer is approximately φn\varphi^n.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2508.02108,
  title  = {Monotone Paths on Acyclic 3-Regular Graphs},
  author = {François Clément and Dan Guyer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.02108},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T04:32:42.864Z