组合数学

In extremal combinatorics, it is common to focus on structures that are minimal with respect to a certain property. In particular, critical and list-critical graphs occupy a prominent place in graph coloring theory. Stiebitz, Tuza, and…

Forty-five years ago, a young researcher in finite permutation group theory encountered a paper by Robert Woodrow. The homogeneous triangle-free graph Woodrow described there seemed to be an infinite analogue of the Higman--Sims graph which…

We consider the problem of enumerating hypermatrices of format $2 \times (k + 1) \times k$ over a finite field that have nonzero hyperdeterminant and whose nonzero entries are restricted to a plane partition. We conjecture an attractive…

A hereditary class of graphs has bounded clique-width if and only if its prime members do, but this lifting property fails for linear clique-width. We prove that a hereditary class has bounded linear clique-width if and only if its prime…

We study a binary Thue--Morse-type sequence arising from the base-$3/2$ expansion of integers, an archetypal automatic sequence in a rational base numeration system. Because the sequence is generated by a periodic iteration of morphisms…

We show that for any $d\ge 2$ and $\Delta>0$ there exists $\eta>0$ such that the following holds: Let $G$ be an $n$-vertex graph with at least $\Omega(n^2)$ edges and let $H$ be an $n$-vertex $d$-degenerate graph with maximum degree at most…

Our main result is a full classification, for every connected graph $H$, of the computational complexity of Steiner Forest on $H$-subgraph-free graphs. To obtain this dichotomy, we establish the following new algorithmic, hardness, and…

Let $G$ be a connected graph. Let $N(G)$ and $S(G)$ be the number of connected sets of $G$ and the sum of the orders of these connected sets of $G$, respectively. Then $A(G)=\frac{S(G)}{N(G)}$ is called the average order of a connected set…

Let $G=(V,E)$ be a simple connected graph. A connected edge cover of $G$ is a subset $S\subseteq E$ such that every vertex of $G$ is incident with at least one edge in $S$ and the subgraph induced by $S$ is connected. The connected edge…

We introduce a ``Kirchhoff--Tur\'an'' variant of the extremal $C_4$ problem: among all simple connected $n$-vertex $C_4$-free graphs $G$, maximize the number of spanning trees $\tau(G)$. For the projective-plane orders $n=q^2+q+1$ we…

Previous work has conjectured that the graded $\mathfrak{S}_n$-representations $H^\bullet(\operatorname{Conf}(n,\mathbb{R}^d);\mathbb{Q})$ are strongly equivariantly log concave, and has proven this conjecture in low degrees. By leveraging…

We study which signs can occur among Hamiltonian circles in simple plane signed graphs. Using a face-based viewpoint, we relate the sign of a Hamiltonian circle to the product of the signs of the faces inside it, and we introduce…

We study $2$-dimensional unit vector flows on graphs, that is, nowhere-zero flows that assign to each oriented edge a unit vector in $\mathbb R^{3}$. We give a new geometric characterization of $\mathbb S^{2}$-flows on cubic graphs. We also…

For a positive integer $r$, the $r$-color size-Ramsey number~$\widehat{R}_r(H)$ of a graph $H$ is the minimum number of edges in a graph $G$ such that every $r$-edge coloring of $G$ contains a monochromatic copy of $H$. For a graph~$H$ and…

In this article we introduce a definition of k-uniform thresholds hypergraphs through a binary sequence, a natural extension of the classical definition for thresholds graphs. We characterize some of its eigenvalues and multiplicities by…

We give a construction of an infinite set of points $A$ in $\mathbb{R}^2$ such that any subset $P\subseteq A$ has a constant density subset $P'$ with no three points collinear and yet $A$ cannot be separated into finitely many subsets such…

Let $\Gamma$ be a group of order $n^2$ and $SMS_{\Gamma}(n)=(a_{i,j})_{n\times n}$ be an $n\times n$ array whose entries are all distinct elements of $\Gamma$. If there exists an element $\mu\in\Gamma$ such that for every row $i$, there…

Katugampola's 2015 study of generalized fractional differential operators produced triangular arrays of integer coefficients indexed by a fractional order r and by dimensions n and k, but no combinatorial interpretation has been established…

We prove the following ``symmetric analogue'' of Lov\'asz's estimate (1975): if an $r$-partite hypergraph of rank $r\geqslant2$ has a cover of cardinality $n<\infty$, then it admits a cover of cardinality at most $nr/2$, which is invariant…

We prove the combinatorial invariance of the coefficient of $q$ in Kazhdan--Lusztig polynomials for arbitrary Coxeter groups. As a result, we obtain the Combinatorial Invariance Conjecture, of Lusztig and of Dyer, also for Bruhat intervals…