Related papers: Courcelle's Theorem Without Logic

A graph has tree-width at most $k$ if it can be obtained from a set of graphs each with at most $k+1$ vertices by a sequence of clique sums. We refine this definition by, for each non-negative integer $\theta$, defining the…

We present a canonical way to decompose finite graphs into highly connected local parts. The decomposition depends only on an integer parameter whose choice sets the intended degree of locality. The global structure of the graph, as…

For an undirected graph G, we consider the following problems: given a fixed graph H, can we partition the vertices of G into two non-empty sets A and B such that neither the induced graph G[A] nor G[B] contain H (i) as a subgraph? (ii) as…

Loebl, Koml\'os and S\'os conjectured that every $n$-vertex graph $G$ with at least $n/2$ vertices of degree at least $k$ contains each tree $T$ of order $k+1$ as a subgraph. We give a sketch of a proof of the approximate version of this…

We generalise structure tree theory, which is based on removing finitely many edges, to removing finitely many vertices. This gives a significant generalization of Tutte's tree decomposition of 2-connected graphs into 3-connected blocks.…

Hyperedge-Replacement grammars (HR) have been introduced by Courcelle in order to extend the notion of context-free sets from words and trees to graphs of bounded tree-width. While for words and trees the syntactic restrictions that…

The Bar\'at-Thomassen conjecture asserts that for every tree $T$ on $m$ edges, there exists a constant $k_T$ such that every $k_T$-edge-connected graph with size divisible by $m$ can be edge-decomposed into copies of $T$. So far this…

We obtain structure theorems for graphs excluding a fan (a path with a universal vertex) or a dipole ($K_{2,k}$) as a topological minor. The corresponding decompositions can be computed in FPT linear time. This is motivated by the study of…

A condition, in two variants, is given such that if a property P satisfies this condition, then every logic which is at least as strong as first-order logic and can express P fails to have the compactness property. The result is used to…

Treewidth is a graph parameter that plays a fundamental role in several structural and algorithmic results. We study the problem of decomposing a given graph $G$ into node-disjoint subgraphs, where each subgraph has sufficiently large…

The connected tree-width of a graph is the minimum width of a tree-decomposition whose parts induce connected subgraphs. Long cycles are examples of graphs that have small tree-width but large connected tree-width. We show that a graph has…

We provide a finite equational presentation of graphs of treewidth at most three, solving an instanceof an open problem by Courcelle and Engelfriet. We use a syntax generalising series-parallel expressions, denoting graphs with a small…

An order-theoretic forest is a countable partial order such that the set of elements larger than any element is linearly ordered. It is an order-theoretic tree if any two elements have an upper-bound. The order type of a branch can be any…

We give new decomposition theorems for classes of graphs that can be transduced in first-order logic from classes of sparse graphs -- more precisely, from classes of bounded expansion and from nowhere dense classes. In both cases, the…

We show how an image can, in principle, be described by the tangles of the graph of its pixels. The tangle-tree theorem provides a nested set of separations that efficiently distinguish all the distinguishable tangles in a graph. This…

Let $\mathbf G$ be a graphing, that is a Borel graph defined by $d$ measure preserving involutions. We prove that if $\mathbf G$ is {\em treeable} then it arises as the local limit of some sequence $(G_n)_{n\in\mathbb{N}}$ of graphs with…

A graph is locally chordal if each of its small-radius balls is chordal. In an earlier work [AKK25], the authors and Kobler proved that locally chordal graphs can be characterized by having chordal local covers, by forbidding short cycles…

Within the field of phylogenetics there is growing interest in measures for summarising the dissimilarity, or 'incongruence', of two or more phylogenetic trees. Many of these measures are NP-hard to compute and this has stimulated a…

We consider distributed model-checking of Monadic Second-Order logic (MSO) on graphs which constitute the topology of communication networks. The graph is thus both the structure being checked and the system on which the distributed…

We prove that if a graph has a tree-decomposition of width at most w, then it has a tree-decomposition of width at most w with certain desirable properties. We will use this result in a subsequent paper to show that every 2-connected graph…