English

Most probably trangle-free graphs

Combinatorics 2026-02-27 v1

Abstract

The celebrated Mantel's theorem states that any triangle-free graph on nn vertices contains at most n2/4\left\lfloor n^2/4\right\rfloor edges. It is natural to ask how many triangles must exist in a graph with more than n2/4\left\lfloor n^2/4\right\rfloor edges--a problem known as the Erd\H{o}s-Rademacher problem. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic variant of this classic problem. Specifically, given an nn-vertex graph GG with n2/4+i\left\lfloor n^2/4\right\rfloor+i (i>0i>0) edges, we choose the edges of GG independently with probability pp, and the resulting new graph is triangle-free with a certain probability. Our goal is to maximize this probability by choosing GG appropriately. For the case where GG has n2/4+1 \left\lfloor n^2/4\right\rfloor +1 edges, we determine the exact maximum probability.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.22782,
  title  = {Most probably trangle-free graphs},
  author = {Yuhang Bai and Gyula O. H. Katona and Zixuan Yang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.22782},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

9 pages

R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:53:33.498Z