English

The multiplication table problem for bipartite graphs

Combinatorics 2016-09-07 v2

Abstract

We investigate the following generalisation of the 'multiplication table problem' of Erd\H{o}s: given a bipartite graph with mm edges, how large is the set of sizes of its induced subgraphs? Erd\H{o}s's problem of estimating the number of distinct products abab with a,bna,b \le n is precisely the problem under consideration when the graph in question is the complete bipartite graph Kn,nK_{n,n}. In this note, we prove that the set of sizes of the induced subgraphs of any bipartite graph with mm edges contains Ω(m/(logm)12)\Omega(m/(\log m)^{12}) distinct elements.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1410.4532,
  title  = {The multiplication table problem for bipartite graphs},
  author = {Bhargav Narayanan and Julian Sahasrabudhe and István Tomon},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1410.4532},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

21 pages, fixed misprints, Combinatorica

R2 v1 2026-06-22T06:26:27.542Z