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Twenty years ago Bondy and Vince conjectured that for any nonnegative integer $k$, except finitely many counterexamples, every graph with $k$ vertices of degree less than three contains two cycles whose lengths differ by one or two. The…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2019-07-25 Jun Gao , Jie Ma

Let $P,Q$ be longest paths in a simple graph. We analyze the possible connections between the components of $P\cup Q\setminus (V(P)\cap V(Q))$ and introduce the notion of a bi-traceable graph. We use the results for all the possible…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2021-05-26 Juan Gutiérrez , Christian Valqui

In this paper, we prove a tight minimum degree condition in general graphs for the existence of paths between two given endpoints, whose lengths form a long arithmetic progression with common difference one or two. This allows us to obtain…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2021-01-27 Jun Gao , Qingyi Huo , Chun-Hung Liu , Jie Ma

The celebrated Erdos-Hajnal conjecture states that for every $n$-vertex undirected graph $H$ there exists $\eps(H)>0$ such that every graph $G$ that does not contain $H$ as an induced subgraph contains a clique or an independent set of size…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2015-08-06 Krzysztof Choromanski , Dvir Falik , Anita Liebenau , Viresh Patel , Marcin Pilipczuk

For a positive integer $k$ and a graph $H$ on $k$ vertices, we are interested in the inducibility of $H$, denoted $\mathrm{ind}(H)$, which is defined as the maximum possible probability that choosing $k$ vertices uniformly at random from a…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-11-27 Richard Ueltzen

The Erd\H{o}s-Hajnal conjecture says that, for every graph $H$, there exists $c>0$ such that every $H$-free graph on $n$ vertices has a clique or stable set of size at least $n^c$. In this paper we are concerned with the case when $H$ is a…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-10-22 Tung Nguyen , Alex Scott , Paul Seymour

We determine, for all $k\geq 6$, the typical structure of graphs that do not contain an induced $2k$-cycle. This verifies a conjecture of Balogh and Butterfield. Surprisingly, the typical structure of such graphs is richer than that…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2015-07-20 Jaehoon Kim , Daniela Kühn , Deryk Osthus , Timothy Townsend

The inducibility of a graph $H$ measures the maximum number of induced copies of $H$ a large graph $G$ can have. Generalizing this notion, we study how many induced subgraphs of fixed order $k$ and size $\ell$ a large graph $G$ on $n$…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2019-11-05 Noga Alon , Dan Hefetz , Michael Krivelevich , Mykhaylo Tyomkyn

It is well known that every sufficiently large connected graph has, as an induced subgraph, $K_n$, $K_{1,n}$, or an $n$-vertex path. A 2023 paper of Allred, Ding, and Oporowski identified a set of unavoidable induced subgraphs of…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-11-25 Wayne Ge , James Oxley

Let $P_{n}$ be a path graph on $n$ vertices. We say that a graph $G$ is $P_{n}$-induced-saturated if $G$ contains no induced copy of $P_{n}$, but deleting any edge of $G$ as well as adding to $G$ any edge of $G^{c}$ creates such a copy.…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2021-03-02 Vojtěch Dvořák

A large body of research in graph theory concerns the induced subgraphs of graphs with large chromatic number, and especially which induced cycles must occur. In this paper, we unify and substantially extend results from a number of…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2018-12-05 Alex Scott , Paul Seymour

We prove a conjecture of Bonamy, Bousquet, Pilipczuk, Rz\k{a}\.zewski, Thomass\'e, and Walczak, that for every graph $H$, there is a polynomial $p$ such that for every positive integer $s$, every graph of average degree at least $p(s)$…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-09-30 Romain Bourneuf , Matija Bucić , Linda Cook , James Davies

The path eccentricity of a connected graph $G$ is the minimum integer $k$ such that $G$ has a path such that every vertex is at distance at most $k$ from the path. A result of Duffus, Jacobson, and Gould from 1981 states that every…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-08-21 Sylwia Cichacz , Claire Hilaire , Tomáš Masařík , Jana Masaříková , Martin Milanič

Several graph properties are characterized as the class of graphs that admit an orientation avoiding finitely many oriented structures. For instance, if $F_k$ is the set of homomorphic images of the directed path on $k+1$ vertices, then a…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2020-12-24 Santiago Guzmán-Pro , César Hernández-Cruz

A hole in a graph is an induced subgraph which is a cycle of length at least four. We prove that for every positive integer k, every triangle-free graph with sufficiently large chromatic number contains holes of k consecutive lengths.

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2018-02-13 Alex Scott , Paul Seymour

In 2022, Gao, Huo, Liu, and Ma proved that every graph with minimum degree at least $k+1$ contains $k$ admissible cycles, where a set of $k$ cycles is said to be admissible if their lengths form an arithmetic progression with common…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-04-03 Jifu Lin

Let us say a graph is $s\mathcal{O}$-free, where $s\ge 1$ is an integer, if there do not exist $s$ cycles of the graph that are pairwise vertex-disjoint and have no edges joining them. The structure of such graphs, even when $s=2$, is not…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2023-01-11 Tung Nguyen , Alex Scott , Paul Seymour

Let $\mathcal{H}$ be a given finite (possibly empty) family of connected graphs, each containing a cycle, and let $G$ be an arbitrary finite $\mathcal{H}$-free graph with minimum degree at least $k$. For $p \in [0,1]$, we form a $p$-random…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2014-01-17 Michael Krivelevich , Wojciech Samotij

Scott proved in 1997 that for any tree $T$, every graph with bounded clique number which does not contain any subdivision of $T$ as an induced subgraph has bounded chromatic number. Scott also conjectured that the same should hold if $T$ is…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2022-03-03 Jérémie Chalopin , Louis Esperet , Zhentao Li , Patrice Ossona de Mendez

Paths $P_1,\ldots, P_k$ in a graph $G=(V,E)$ are mutually induced if any two distinct $P_i$ and $P_j$ have neither common vertices nor adjacent vertices. The Induced Disjoint Paths problem is to decide if a graph $G$ with $k$ pairs of…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2022-07-19 Barnaby Martin , Daniël Paulusma , Siani Smith , Erik Jan van Leeuwen