KAIST Discrete Math Seminar

Graphs are mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects.
Graph decomposition problems ask to partition the edges of large/dense graphs into small/sparse graphs.
In this talk, we introduce several famous graph decomposition problems, related puzzles and known results on the problems.

Any structure whose language is finite has a model of graph theory which is bi-interpretable with it. From this idea, Mekler further developed a way of interpreting a model into a group. This Mekler’s construction preserves various model-theoretic properties such as stability, simplicity, and NTP2, thus helps us find new group examples in model theory. In this talk, I will introduce to you what Mekler’s construction is and briefly show that this preserves NTP1.

One of the cornerstones of extremal graph theory is a result of Füredi, later reproved and given due prominence by Alon, Krivelevich and Sudakov, saying that if H is a bipartite graph with maximum degree r on one side, then there is a constant C such that every graph with n vertices and C n^{2 – 1/r} edges contains a copy of H. This result is tight up to the constant when H contains a copy of K_r,s with s sufficiently large in terms of r. We conjecture that this is essentially the only situation in which Füredi’s result can be tight and prove this conjecture for r = 2. More precisely, we show that if H is a C₄-free bipartite graph with maximum degree 2 on one side, then there are positive constants C and δ such that every graph with n vertices and C n^{3/2 – δ} edges contains a copy of H. This answers a question by Erdős from 1988. The proof relies on a novel variant of the dependent random choice technique which may be of independent interest. This is joint work with David Conlon.

The infamous Erdős-Szekeres conjecture, posed in 1935, states that the minimum number ES(n) of points on a plane in general position (that is, no three colinear points) that guarantees a subset of n points in convex position is equal to 2^(n-2) + 1. Despite many years of effort, the upper bound of ES(n) had not been better than O(4^{n – o(n)}) until Suk proved the groundbreaking result ES(n)≤2^n+o(n) in 2016.
In this talk, we focus on a variant of this problem by Erdős, Tuza and Valtr regarding the number ETV(a, b, n) of points needed to force either an a-cup, b-cap or a convex n-gon for varying a, b and n. They showed ETV(a, b, n) > \sum_{i=n-b}^{a-2} \binom{n}{i-2} by supplying a set of points with no a-cup, b-cap nor a n-gon of that many number, and conjectured that the inequality cannot be improved. Due to their construction, the conjecture is in fact equivalent to the Erdős-Szekeres conjecture. However, even the simplest equality ETV(4, n, n) = \binom{n+1}{2} + 1, which must be true if the Erdős-Szekeres conjecture is, has not been verified yet. To the best of our knowledge, the bound ETV(4, n, n) ≤ \binom{n + 2}{2} – 1, mentioned by Balko and Valtr in 2015, is currently the best bound known in literature.
The talk is divided into two parts. First, we introduce the mentioned works on the Erdős-Szekeres conjecture and observe that the argument of Suk can be directly adapted to prove an improved bound of ETV(a, n, n). Then we show the bound ETV(4, n, n) ≤ \binom{n+2}{2} – C \sqrt{n} for a fixed constant C>0, improving the previously known best bound of Balko and Valtr.

Counting problems on sets of integers with additive constraints have been extensively studied. In contrast, the counting problems for sets with multiplicative constraints remain largely unexplored. In this talk, we will discuss two such recent results, one on primitive sets and the other on multiplicative Sidon sets. Based on joint work with Peter Pach, and with Peter Pach and Richard Palincza.