Related papers: Coarse Balanced Separators and Tree-Decompositions

Alon, Seymour and Thomas [1990] proved that every $n$-vertex graph excluding $K_t$ as a minor has treewidth less than $t^{3/2}\sqrt{n}$. Illingworth, Scott and Wood [2022] recently refined this result by showing that every such graph is a…

A \emph{queue layout} of a graph consists of a \emph{linear order} of its vertices and a partition of its edges into \emph{queues}, so that no two independent edges of the same queue are nested. The \emph{queue number} of a graph is the…

The planar separator theorem by Lipton and Tarjan [FOCS '77, SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics '79] states that any planar graph with $n$ vertices has a balanced separator of size $O(\sqrt{n})$ that can be found in linear time. This…

Partitioning a graph using graph separators, and particularly clique separators, are well-known techniques to decompose a graph into smaller units which can be treated independently. It was previously known that the treewidth was bounded…

We present a method for reducing the treewidth of a graph while preserving all of its minimal $s-t$ separators up to a certain fixed size $k$. This technique allows us to solve $s-t$ Cut and Multicut problems with various additional…

The disjoint paths problem asks, given an graph G and k + 1 pairs of terminals (s_0,t_0), ...,(s_k,t_k), whether there are k+1 pairwise disjoint paths P_0, ...,P_k, such that P_i connects s_i to t_i. Robertson and Seymour have proven that…

One of the major results of [N. Robertson and P. D. Seymour. Graph minors. XIII. The disjoint paths problem. J. Combin. Theory Ser. B, 63(1):65--110, 1995], also known as the weak structure theorem, revealed the local structure of graphs…

As a major step in their proof of Wagner's conjecture, Robertson and Seymour showed that every graph not containing a fixed graph $H$ as a minor has a tree-decomposition in which each torso is almost embeddable in a surface of bounded…

Treewidth is a parameter that emerged from the study of minor closed classes of graphs (i.e. classes closed under vertex and edge deletion, and edge contraction). It in some sense describes the global structure of a graph. Roughly, a graph…

Tree-decompositions of graphs are of fundamental importance in structural and algorithmic graph theory. The main property of tree-decompositions is the width (the maximum size of a bag minus 1). We show that every graph has a…

The hyperbolicity of a graph, informally, measures how close a graph is (metrically) to a tree. Hence, it is intuitively similar to treewidth, but the measures are formally incomparable. Motivated by the broad study of algorithms and…

In [Directed tree-width, J. Combin. Theory Ser. B 82 (2001), 138-154] we introduced the notion of tree-width of directed graphs and presented a conjecture, formulated during discussions with Noga Alon and Bruce Reed, stating that a digraph…

Cliquewidth is a dense analogue of treewidth. It can be deduced from recent results by Hickingbotham [arXiv:2501.10840] and Nguyen, Scott, and Seymour [arXiv:2501.09839] that graphs of bounded cliquewidth are quasi-isometric to graphs of…

It is known that any planar graph with diameter D has treewidth O(D), and this fact has been used as the basis for several planar graph algorithms. We investigate the extent to which similar relations hold in other graph families. We show…

For undirected graphs $G=(V,E)$ and $G_0=(V_0,E_0)$, say that $G$ is a region intersection graph over $G_0$ if there is a family of connected subsets $\{ R_u \subseteq V_0 : u \in V \}$ of $G_0$ such that $\{u,v\} \in E \iff R_u \cap R_v…

This paper explores the structure of graphs defined by an excluded minor or an excluded odd minor through the lens of graph products and tree-decompositions. We prove that every graph excluding a fixed odd minor is contained in the strong…

The class of all even-hole-free graphs has unbounded tree-width, as it contains all complete graphs. Recently, a class of (even-hole, $K_4$)-free graphs was constructed, that still has unbounded tree-width [Sintiari and Trotignon, 2019].…

By the Grid Minor Theorem of Robertson and Seymour, every graph of sufficiently large tree-width contains a large grid as a minor. Tree-width may therefore be regarded as a measure of 'grid-likeness' of a graph. The grid contains a long…

Let $G$ be a graph, $S \subseteq V(G)$ be a vertex set in $G$ and $r$ be a positive integer. The distance $r$-independence number of $S$ is the size of the largest subset $I \subseteq S$ such that no pair $u$, $v$ of vertices in $I$ have a…

For every positive integer $k$, we define the $k$-treedepth as the largest graph parameter $\mathrm{td}_k$ satisfying (i) $\mathrm{td}_k(\emptyset)=0$; (ii) $\mathrm{td}_k(G) \leq 1+ \mathrm{td}_k(G-u)$ for every graph $G$ and every vertex…