Related papers: Optimizing the Graph Minors Weak Structure Theorem
Robertson and Seymour proved that for every finite tree $H$, there exists $k$ such that every finite graph $G$ with no $H$ minor has path-width at most $k$; and conversely, for every integer $k$, there is a finite tree $H$ such that every…
In recent years, there has been significant interest in characterizing the induced subgraph obstructions to bounded treewidth and pathwidth. While this has recently been resolved for pathwidth, the case of treewidth remains open, and prior…
A set S of vertices of a graph is a defensive alliance if, for each element of S, the majority of its neighbors is in S. The problem of finding a defensive alliance of minimum size in a given graph is NP-hard and there are polynomial-time…
The Disjoint Paths Problem asks, given a graph $G$ and a set of pairs of terminals $(s_{1},t_{1}),\ldots,(s_{k},t_{k})$, whether there is a collection of $k$ pairwise vertex-disjoint paths linking $s_{i}$ and $t_{i}$, for $i=1,\ldots,k.$ In…
A classical result of Robertson and Seymour (1986) states that the treewidth of a graph is linearly tied to its separation number: the smallest integer $k$ such that, for every weighting of the vertices, the graph admits a balanced…
For an $n$-vertex graph $G$, let $z(G;k)$ denote the number of zero forcing sets of size $k$. A conjecture of Boyer et al. asserts that the path $P_n$ maximizes these numbers coefficientwise among all $n$-vertex graphs; equivalently, the…
We give an elementary and self-contained proof, and a numerical improvement, of a weaker form of the excluded clique minor theorem of Robertson and Seymour, the following. Let t,r>0 be integers, and let R=49152t^{24}(40t^2+r). An r-wall is…
Let $P$ be a graph with a vertex $v$ such that $P\backslash v$ is a forest, and let $Q$ be an outerplanar graph. We prove that there exists a number $p=p(P,Q)$ such that every 2-connected graph of path-width at least $p$ has a minor…
The aspect ratio of a (positively) weighted graph $G$ is the ratio of its maximum edge weight to its minimum edge weight. Aspect ratio commonly arises as a complexity measure in graph algorithms, especially related to the computation of…
Coarse graph theory concerns finding 'coarse' analogues of graph theory theorems, replacing disjointness with being far apart. One of the most interesting open questions is to find a coarse analogue of Menger's theorem, which characterizes…
One of the fundamental results in graph minor theory is that for every planar graph~$H$, there is a minimum integer~$f(H)$ such that graphs with no minor isomorphic to~$H$ have treewidth at most~$f(H)$. The best known bound for an arbitrary…
The grid theorem, originally proved by Robertson and Seymour in Graph Minors V in 1986, is one of the most central results in the study of graph minors. It has found numerous applications in algorithmic graph structure theory, for instance…
Slimness of a graph measures the local deviation of its metric from a tree metric. In a graph $G=(V,E)$, a geodesic triangle $\bigtriangleup(x,y,z)$ with $x, y, z\in V$ is the union $P(x,y) \cup P(x,z) \cup P(y,z)$ of three shortest paths…
Treewidth and Hadwiger number are two of the most important parameters in structural graph theory. This paper studies graph classes in which large treewidth implies the existence of a large complete graph minor. To formalise this, we say…
Distributed network optimization algorithms, such as minimum spanning tree, minimum cut, and shortest path, are an active research area in distributed computing. This paper presents a fast distributed algorithm for such problems in the…
Graph product structure theory expresses certain graphs as subgraphs of the strong product of much simpler graphs. In particular, an elegant formulation for the corresponding structural theorems involves the strong product of a path and of…
Let $H$ be a fixed graph. What can be said about graphs $G$ that have no subgraph isomorphic to a subdivision of $H$? Grohe and Marx proved that such graphs $G$ satisfy a certain structure theorem that is not satisfied by graphs that…
We study Subgraph Isomorphism on graph classes defined by a fixed forbidden graph. Although there are several ways for forbidding a graph, we observe that it is reasonable to focus on the minor relation since other well-known relations lead…
In this paper, we investigate the problem of finding {\it bisections} (i.e., balanced bipartitions) in graphs. We prove the following two results for {\it all} graphs $G$: (1). $G$ has a bisection where each vertex $v$ has at least $(1/4 -…
We present an easy structure theorem for graphs which do not admit an immersion of the complete graph. The theorem motivates the definition of a variation of tree decompositions based on edge cuts instead of vertex cuts which we call…