Seminars and Colloquia by Series

Planar Graphs and Planar Posets III

Series
Graph Theory Seminar
Time
Thursday, September 17, 2009 - 12:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 255
Speaker
William T. Trotter – Math, GT
This is the third session in this series and a special effort will be made to make it self contained ... to the fullest extent possible.With Felsner and Li, we proved that the dimension of the adjacency poset of a graph is bounded as a function of the genus. For planar graphs, we have an upper bound of 8 and for outerplanar graphs, an upper bound of 5. For lower bounds, we have respectively 5 and 4. However, for bipartite planar graphs, we have an upper bound of 4, which is best possible. The proof of this last result uses the Brightwell/Trotter work on the dimension of thevertex/edge/face poset of a planar graph, and led to the following conjecture:For each h, there exists a constant c_h so that if P is a poset of height h and the cover graph of P is planar, then the dimension of P is at most c_h.With Stefan Felsner, we have recently resolved this conjecture in the affirmative. From below, we know from a construction of Kelly that c_h must grow linearly with h.

Planar Graphs and Planar Posets II

Series
Graph Theory Seminar
Time
Thursday, September 3, 2009 - 12:05 for 1.5 hours (actually 80 minutes)
Location
Skiles 255
Speaker
William T. Trotter – School of Mathematics, Georgia Tech
We will discuss the classic theorem of Walter Schnyder: a graph G is planar if and only if the dimension of its incidence poset is at most 3. This result has been extended by Brightwell and Trotter to show that the dimension of the vertex-edge-face poset of a planar 3-connected graph is 4 and the removal of any vertex (or by duality, any face) reduces the dimension to 3. Recently, this result and its extension to planar multigraphs was key to resolving the question of the dimension of the adjacency poset of a planar bipartite graph. It also serves to motivate questions about the dimension of posets with planar cover graphs.

Planar graphs and planar posets

Series
Graph Theory Seminar
Time
Thursday, August 27, 2009 - 12:05 for 1.5 hours (actually 80 minutes)
Location
Skiles 255
Speaker
William T. Trotter – Math, GT
Slightly modifying a quote of Paul Erdos: The problem for graphs we solve this week. The corresponding problem for posets will take longer. As one example, testing a graph to determine if it is planar is linear in the number of edges. Testing an order (Hasse) diagram to determine if it is planar is NP-complete. As a second example, it is NP-complete to determine whether a graph is a cover graph. With these remarks in mind, we present some results, mostly new but some classic, regarding posets with planar cover graphs and planar diagrams. The most recent result is that for every h, there is a constant c_h so that if P is a poset of height h and the cover graph of P is planar, then the dimension of P is at most c_h.

Cubic graph with large girth

Series
Graph Theory Seminar
Time
Thursday, June 11, 2009 - 11:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 255
Speaker
Daniel Kral – ITI, Charles University, Prague

We study several parameters of cubic graphs with large girth. In particular, we prove that every n-vertex cubic graph with sufficiently large girth satisfies the following:

  • has a dominating set of size at most 0.29987n (which improves the previous bound of 0.32122n of Rautenbach and Reed)
  • has fractional chromatic number at most 2.37547 (which improves the previous bound of 2.66881 of Hatami and Zhu)
  • has independent set of size at least 0.42097n (which improves the previous bound of 0.41391n of Shearer), and
  • has fractional total chromatic number arbitrarily close to 4 (which answers in the affirmative a conjecture of Reed). More strongly, there exists g such that the fractional total chromatic number of every bridgeless graph with girth at least g is equal to 4.
The presented bounds are based on a simple probabilistic argument.

The presentation is based on results obtained jointly with Tomas Kaiser, Andrew King, Petr Skoda and Jan Volec.

Crossing-critical graphs with large maximum degree

Series
Graph Theory Seminar
Time
Thursday, June 4, 2009 - 11:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 255
Speaker
Zdenek Dvorak – Simon Fraser University
Richter and Salazar conjectured that graphs that are critical for a fixed crossing number k have bounded bandwidth. A weaker well-known conjecture of Richter is that their maximum degree is bounded in terms of k. We disprove these conjectures for every k >170, by providing examples of k-crossing-critical graphs with arbitrarily large maximum degree, and explore the structure of such graphs.

K_5 subdivisions in 5-connected nonplanar graphs

Series
Graph Theory Seminar
Time
Thursday, April 23, 2009 - 12:05 for 1.5 hours (actually 80 minutes)
Location
Skiles 255
Speaker
Jie Ma – School of Mathematics, Georgia Tech
A well know theorem of Kuratowski states that a graph is planar graph iff it contains no TK_5 or TK_{3,3}. In 1970s Seymour conjectured that every 5-connected nonplanar graph contains a TK_5. In the talk we will discuss several special cases of the conjecture, for example the graphs containing K_4^- (K_4 withour an edge). A related independent paths theorem also will be covered.

Reduced divisors on graphs and metric graphs

Series
Graph Theory Seminar
Time
Wednesday, April 22, 2009 - 11:05 for 1.5 hours (actually 80 minutes)
Location
Skiles 269
Speaker
Matt Baker – School of Mathematics, Georgia Tech
I will discuss some new results, as well as new interpretations of some old results, concerning reduced divisors (a.k.a. G-parking functions) on graphs, metric graphs, and tropical curves.

Counting flags in digraphs

Series
Graph Theory Seminar
Time
Thursday, March 19, 2009 - 11:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 269
Speaker
Sergey Norin – Princeton University
Many results in asymptotic extremal combinatorics are obtained using just a handful of instruments, such as induction and Cauchy-Schwarz inequality. The ingenuity lies in combining these tools in just the right way. Recently, Razborov developed a flag calculus which captures many of the available techniques in pure form, and allows one, in particular, to computerize the search for the right combination. In this talk we outline the general approach and describe its application to the conjecture that a digraph with minimum outdegree n/3 contains a directed triangle. This special case of the Caccetta-Haggkvist conjecture has been extensively investigated in the past. We show that a digraph with minimum outdegree a*n contains a directed triangle for a = 0.3465. The proof builds on arguments used to establish previously known bounds, due to Shen from 1998 (a = 0.3542) and Hamburger, Haxell and Kostochka from 2008 (a = 0.3531). It consists of a combination of ~80 computer generated inequalities. Based on joint work with Jan Hladky and Daniel Kral.

Tiling R^n by unit cubes

Series
Graph Theory Seminar
Time
Thursday, February 19, 2009 - 12:05 for 1.5 hours (actually 80 minutes)
Location
Skiles 255
Speaker
Peter Horak – University of Washington, Tacoma
Tiling problems belong to the oldest problems in whole mathematics. They attracted attention of many famous mathematicians. Even one of the Hilbert problems is devoted to the topic. The interest in tilings by unit cubes originated with a conjecture raised by Minkowski in 1908. In this lecture we will discuss the conjecture, and other closely related problems.

Some recent results in topological graph theory

Series
Graph Theory Seminar
Time
Thursday, January 15, 2009 - 12:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 255
Speaker
Hein van der Holst – Eindhoven University of Technology
Each graph can be embedded in 3-space. The problem becomes more interesting if we put restrictions on the type of embedding. For example, a linkless embedding of a graph is one where each pair of vertex-disjoint circuits has linking number equal to zero. The class of all graphs that have a linkless embedding is closed under taking minors. Robertson, Seymour, and Thomas gave the forbidden minors for this class of graphs. Open remained how to find a linkless embedding in polynomial time. In the talk we start with discussing an algorithm to find a linkless embedding.Instead of embedding the graph in 3-space, we could also consider mapping properties of certain superstructures of the graph in 3-space, and, indeed, if this superstructure has not the right mapping properties in 3-space, see whether it has the right one in 4-space, etc. Recently, we introduced for a graph G a new graph parameter \sigma(G), which is defined as the smallest d such that superstructures of G have a zero intersection mapping in d-space. The nicest property of this graph parameter is its independence of the superstructure and thus depends on the graph only. For d=2 and d=3, \sigma(G) \leq d if and only if G is outerplanar and planar, respectively. The graphs G with \sigma(G)\leq 4 are exactly those that have a linkless embedding. In the second part of the talk we will discuss this new graph parameter. (This part is joint work with R. Pendavingh.)

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