Related papers: Piercing the chessboard

A graph is called a $k$-planar unit distance graph if it can be drawn in the plane such that every edge is a unit line segment and is involved in at most $k$ crossings. We investigate $u_k(n)$, the maximum number of edges of such graphs on…

Given a simple polygon $P$ on $n$ vertices, and a set $D$ of $m$ pairwise intersecting geodesic disks in $P$, we show that five points in $P$ are always sufficient to pierce all the disks in $D$. This improves the previous bound of 14,…

For a bipartite graph $H$, its linear threshold is the smallest real number $\sigma$ such that every bipartite graph $G = (U \sqcup V, E)$ with unbalanced parts $|V| \gtrsim |U|^\sigma$ and without a copy of $H$ must have a linear number of…

Let $k_r(n,\delta)$ be the minimum number of $r$-cliques in graphs with $n$ vertices and minimum degree $\delta$. We evaluate $k_r(n,\delta)$ for $\delta \leq 4n/5$ and some other cases. Moreover, we give a construction, which we conjecture…

Consider a distribution of pebbles on a connected graph $G$. A pebbling move removes two pebbles from a vertex and places one to an adjacent vertex. A vertex is reachable under a pebbling distribution if it has a pebble after the…

For a non-square positive integer x, let k_x denote the distance between x^3 and the perfect square closest to x^3. A conjecture of Marshall Hall states that the ratios r_x = (x^(1/2))/k_x, are bounded above. (Elkies has shown that any such…

Let $M_n$ be the minimal position at generation $n$, of a real-valued branching random walk in the boundary case. As $n \to \infty$, $M_n- {3 \over 2} \log n$ is tight (see [1][9][2]). We establish here a law of iterated logarithm for the…

Minimum $k$-Section denotes the NP-hard problem to partition the vertex set of a graph into $k$ sets of sizes as equal as possible while minimizing the cut width, which is the number of edges between these sets. When $k$ is an input…

We study a geometric facility location problem under imprecision. Given $n$ unit intervals in the real line, each with one of $k$ colors, the goal is to place one point in each interval such that the resulting \emph{minimum color-spanning…

The second part of the Hilbert's sixteenth problem consists in determining the upper bound $\mathcal{H}(n)$ for the number of limit cycles that planar polynomial vector fields of degree $n$ can have. For $n\geq2$, it is still unknown…

The class P is in fact a proper sub-class of NP. We explore topological properties of the Hamming space 2^[n] where [n]={1, 2,..., n}. With the developed theory, we show: (i) a theorem that is closely related to Erdos and Rado's sunflower…

We prove that for each $D\ge 2$ there exists $c>0$ such that whenever $b\le c\big(\tfrac{n}{\log n}\big)^{1/D}$, in the $(1:b)$ Maker-Breaker game played on $E(K_n)$, Maker has a strategy to guarantee claiming a graph $G$ containing copies…

We give exact and approximation algorithms for two-center problems when the input is a set $\mathcal{D}$ of disks in the plane. We first study the problem of finding two smallest congruent disks such that each disk in $\mathcal{D}$…

It has been long conjectured that the crossing numbers of the complete bipartite graph K_{m,n} and of the complete graph K_n equal Z(m,n) (the value conjectured by Zarankiewicz, who came up with a drawing reaching this value) and Z(n)…

We show that for every integer $n\geq 1$ there exists a graph $G_n$ with $(1+o(1))n$ vertices and $n^{1 + o(1)}$ edges such that every $n$-vertex planar graph is isomorphic to a subgraph of $G_n$. The best previous bound on the number of…

In this paper, the problem of bounding the number of reducible curves in a pencil of algebraic plane curves is addressed. Unlike most of the previous related works, each reducible curve of the pencil is here counted with its appropriate…

The \emph{spanning tree packing number} of a graph $G$ is the maximum number of edge-disjoint spanning trees contained in $G$. Let $k\geq 1$ be a fixed integer. Palmer and Spencer proved that in almost every random graph process, the…

Given a connected graph $G$ and its vertex $x$, let $U_x(G)$ denote the universal cover of $G$ obtained by unfolding $G$ into a tree starting from $x$. Let $T=T(n)$ be the minimum number such that, for graphs $G$ and $H$ with at most $n$…

Let $H$ and $G$ be graphs such that $H$ has at least 3 vertices and is connected. The $H$-line graph of $G$, denoted by $HL(G)$, is that graph whose vertices are the edges of $G$ and where two vertices of $HL(G)$ are adjacent if they are…

The "pancake problem" asks how many prefix reversals are sufficient to sort any permutation $\pi \in \mathcal{S}_k$ to the identity. We write $f(k)$ to denote this quantity. The best known bounds are that $\frac{15}{14}k -O(1) \le f(k)\le…