In this paper we show that every non-cycle finite transitive directed graph has a Cuntz–Krieger family whose WOT-closed algebra is $B(\mathcal {H})$. This is accomplished through a new construction that reduces this problem to in-degree 2-regular graphs, which is then treated by applying the periodic Road Colouring Theorem of Béal and Perrin. As a consequence we show that finite disjoint unions of finite transitive directed graphs are exactly those finite graphs which admit self-adjoint free semigroupoid algebras.

There has been substantial interest in estimating the value of a graph parameter, i.e. of a real-valued function defined on the set of finite graphs, by querying a randomly sampled substructure whose size is independent of the size of the input. Graph parameters that may be successfully estimated in this way are said to be testable or estimable, and the sample complexity qz = qz(ε) of an estimable parameter z is the size of a random sample of a graph G required to ensure that the value of z(G) may be estimated within an error of ε with probability at least 2/3. In this paper, for any fixed monotone graph property $\mathcal{P}= \text{Forb}\!(\mathcal{F}),$ we study the sample complexity of estimating a bounded graph parameter z that, for an input graph G, counts the number of spanning subgraphs of G that satisfy$\mathcal{P}$. To improve upon previous upper bounds on the sample complexity, we show that the vertex set of any graph that satisfies a monotone property $\mathcal{P}$ may be partitioned equitably into a constant number of classes in such a way that the cluster graph induced by the partition is not far from satisfying a natural weighted graph generalization of $\mathcal{P}$. Properties for which this holds are said to be recoverable, and the study of recoverable properties may be of independent interest.

A meander is a topological configuration of a line and a simple closed curve in the plane (or a pair of simple closed curves on the 2-sphere) intersecting transversally. Meanders can be traced back to H. Poincaré and naturally appear in various areas of mathematics, theoretical physics and computational biology (in particular, they provide a model of polymer folding). Enumeration of meanders is an important open problem. The number of meanders with $2N$ crossings grows exponentially when $N$ grows, but the long-standing problem on the precise asymptotics is still out of reach.

We show that the situation becomes more tractable if one additionally fixes the topological type (or the total number of minimal arcs) of a meander. Then we are able to derive simple asymptotic formulas for the numbers of meanders as $N$ tends to infinity. We also compute the asymptotic probability of getting a simple closed curve on a sphere by identifying the endpoints of two arc systems (one on each of the two hemispheres) along the common equator.

The new tools we bring to bear are based on interpretation of meanders as square-tiled surfaces with one horizontal and one vertical cylinder. The proofs combine recent results on Masur–Veech volumes of moduli spaces of meromorphic quadratic differentials in genus zero with our new observation that horizontal and vertical separatrix diagrams of integer quadratic differentials are asymptotically uncorrelated. The additional combinatorial constraints we impose in this article yield explicit polynomial asymptotics.

The directed preferential attachment model is revisited. A new exact characterization of the limiting in- and out-degree distribution is given by two independent pure birth processes that are observed at a common exponentially distributed time T (thus creating dependence between in- and out-degree). The characterization gives an explicit form for the joint degree distribution, and this confirms previously derived tail probabilities for the two marginal degree distributions. The new characterization is also used to obtain an explicit expression for tail probabilities in which both degrees are large. A new generalized directed preferential attachment model is then defined and analyzed using similar methods. The two extensions, motivated by empirical evidence, are to allow double-directed (i.e. undirected) edges in the network, and to allow the probability of connecting an ingoing (outgoing) edge to a specified node to also depend on the out-degree (in-degree) of that node.

We establish an invariance principle and a large deviation principle for a biased random walk ${\text{RW}}_\lambda$ with $\lambda\in [0,1)$ on $\mathbb{Z}^d$ . The scaling limit in the invariance principle is not a d-dimensional Brownian motion. For the large deviation principle, its rate function is different from that of a drifted random walk, as may be expected, though the reflected biased random walk evolves like the drifted random walk in the interior of the first quadrant and almost surely visits coordinate planes finitely many times.

In this paper we consider random trees associated with the genealogy of Crump–Mode–Jagers processes and perform Bernoulli bond-percolation whose parameter depends on the size of the tree. Our purpose is to show the existence of a giant percolation cluster for appropriate regimes as the size grows. We stress that the family trees of Crump–Mode–Jagers processes include random recursive trees, preferential attachment trees, binary search trees for which this question has been answered by Bertoin [7], as well as (more general) m-ary search trees, fragmentation trees, and median-of-( $2\ell+1$ ) binary search trees, to name a few, where to our knowledge percolation has not yet been studied.

We consider a simple preferential attachment graph process, which begins with a finite graph and in which a new (t + 1)st vertex is added at each subsequent time step t that is connected to each previous vertex u ≤ t with probability du(t)/t, where du(t) is the degree of u at time t. We analyse the graph obtained as the infinite limit of this process, and we show that, as long as the initial finite graph is neither edgeless nor complete, with probability 1 the outcome will be a copy of the Rado graph augmented with a finite number of either isolated or universal vertices.

We give an example of a long range Bernoulli percolation process on a group non-quasi-isometric with ℤ, in which clusters are almost surely finite for all values of the parameter. This random graph admits diverse equivalent definitions, and we study their ramifications. We also study its expected size and point out certain phase transitions.

The theta graph ${\Theta _{\ell ,t}}$ consists of two vertices joined by t vertex-disjoint paths, each of length $\ell $ . For fixed odd $\ell $ and large t, we show that the largest graph not containing ${\Theta _{\ell ,t}}$ has at most ${c_\ell }{t^{1 - 1/\ell }}{n^{1 + 1/\ell }}$ edges and that this is tight apart from the value of ${c_\ell }$ .

Let c denote the largest constant such that every C6-free graph G contains a bipartite and C4-free subgraph having a fraction c of edges of G. Győri, Kensell and Tompkins showed that 3/8 ⩽ c ⩽ 2/5. We prove that c = 38. More generally, we show that for any ε > 0, and any integer k ⩾ 2, there is a C2k-free graph $G'$ which does not contain a bipartite subgraph of girth greater than 2k with more than a fraction

$$\Bigl(1-\frac{1}{2^{2k-2}}\Bigr)\frac{2}{2k-1}(1+\varepsilon)$$

$G'$

$G''$

$$\Bigl(1-\frac{1}{2^{k-1}}\Bigr)\frac{1}{k-1}(1+\varepsilon)$$

$G''$

One of our proofs uses the following statement, which we prove using probabilistic ideas, generalizing a theorem of Erdős. For any ε > 0, and any integers a, b, k ⩾ 2, there exists an a-uniform hypergraph H of girth greater than k which does not contain any b-colourable subhypergraph with more than a fraction

$$\Bigl(1-\frac{1}{b^{a-1}}\Bigr)(1+\varepsilon)$$

In addition, we give a new and very short proof of a result of Kühn and Osthus, which states that every bipartite C2k-free graph G contains a C4-free subgraph with at least a fraction 1/(k−1) of the edges of G. We also answer a question of Kühn and Osthus about C2k-free graphs obtained by pasting together C2l’s (with k >l ⩾ 3).

We show that a dense subset of a sufficiently large group multiplication table contains either a large part of the addition table of the integers modulo some k, or the entire multiplication table of a certain large abelian group, as a subgrid. As a consequence, we show that triples systems coming from a finite group contain configurations with t triples spanning $ O(\sqrt t )$ vertices, which is the best possible up to the implied constant. We confirm that for all t we can find a collection of t triples spanning at most t + 3 vertices, resolving the Brown–Erdős–Sós conjecture in this context. The proof applies well-known arithmetic results including the multidimensional versions of Szemerédi’s theorem and the density Hales–Jewett theorem.

This result was discovered simultaneously and independently by Nenadov, Sudakov and Tyomkyn [5], and a weaker result avoiding the arithmetic machinery was obtained independently by Wong [11].

In this paper, we study how to distinguish the embedded topology of a smooth quartic and its bitangent lines. In order to do this, we introduce the concept of two-graphs and switching classes from graph theory. This new method improves previous results about a quartic and three bitangent lines considered by E. Artal Bartolo and J. Vallès, four bitangent lines considered by the authors and H. Tokunaga, and enables us to distinguish the embedded topology of a smooth quartic and five or more bitangent lines. As an application, we obtain a new Zariski 5-tuple and a Zariski 9-tuple for arrangements consisting of a smooth quartic and five of its bitangent lines and six of its bitangent lines, respectively.

We prove that the class of reflexive asymptotic-$c_{0}$ Banach spaces is coarsely rigid, meaning that if a Banach space $X$ coarsely embeds into a reflexive asymptotic-$c_{0}$ space $Y$, then $X$ is also reflexive and asymptotic-$c_{0}$. In order to achieve this result, we provide a purely metric characterization of this class of Banach spaces. This metric characterization takes the form of a concentration inequality for Lipschitz maps on the Hamming graphs, which is rigid under coarse embeddings. Using an example of a quasi-reflexive asymptotic-$c_{0}$ space, we show that this concentration inequality is not equivalent to the non-equi-coarse embeddability of the Hamming graphs.

The field of descriptive combinatorics investigates to what extent classical combinatorial results and techniques can be made topologically or measure-theoretically well behaved. This paper examines a class of coloring problems induced by actions of countable groups on Polish spaces, with the requirement that the desired coloring be Baire measurable. We show that the set of all such coloring problems that admit a Baire measurable solution for a particular free action $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}$ is complete analytic (apart from the trivial situation when the orbit equivalence relation induced by $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}$ is smooth on a comeager set); this result confirms the ‘hardness’ of finding a topologically well-behaved coloring. When $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}$ is the shift action, we characterize the class of problems for which $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}$ has a Baire measurable coloring in purely combinatorial terms; it turns out that closely related concepts have already been studied in graph theory with no relation to descriptive set theory. We remark that our framework permits a wholly dynamical interpretation (with colorings corresponding to equivariant maps to a given subshift), so this article can also be viewed as a contribution to generic dynamics.

Let $M$ be a regular matroid. The Jacobian group $\text{Jac}(M)$ of $M$ is a finite abelian group whose cardinality is equal to the number of bases of $M$. This group generalizes the definition of the Jacobian group (also known as the critical group or sandpile group) $\operatorname{Jac}(G)$ of a graph $G$ (in which case bases of the corresponding regular matroid are spanning trees of $G$). There are many explicit combinatorial bijections in the literature between the Jacobian group of a graph $\text{Jac}(G)$ and spanning trees. However, most of the known bijections use vertices of $G$ in some essential way and are inherently ‘nonmatroidal’. In this paper, we construct a family of explicit and easy-to-describe bijections between the Jacobian group of a regular matroid $M$ and bases of $M$, many instances of which are new even in the case of graphs. We first describe our family of bijections in a purely combinatorial way in terms of orientations; more specifically, we prove that the Jacobian group of $M$ admits a canonical simply transitive action on the set ${\mathcal{G}}(M)$ of circuit–cocircuit reversal classes of $M$, and then define a family of combinatorial bijections $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D70E},\unicode[STIX]{x1D70E}^{\ast }}$ between ${\mathcal{G}}(M)$ and bases of $M$. (Here $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70E}$ (respectively $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70E}^{\ast }$) is an acyclic signature of the set of circuits (respectively cocircuits) of $M$.) We then give a geometric interpretation of each such map $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}=\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D70E},\unicode[STIX]{x1D70E}^{\ast }}$ in terms of zonotopal subdivisions which is used to verify that $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}$ is indeed a bijection. Finally, we give a combinatorial interpretation of lattice points in the zonotope $Z$; by passing to dilations we obtain a new derivation of Stanley’s formula linking the Ehrhart polynomial of $Z$ to the Tutte polynomial of $M$.

Random constraint satisfaction problems play an important role in computer science and combinatorics. For example, they provide challenging benchmark examples for algorithms, and they have been harnessed in probabilistic constructions of combinatorial structures with peculiar features. In an important contribution (Krzakala et al. 2007, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci.), physicists made several predictions on the precise location and nature of phase transitions in random constraint satisfaction problems. Specifically, they predicted that their satisfiability thresholds are quite generally preceded by several other thresholds that have a substantial impact both combinatorially and computationally. These include the condensation phase transition, where long-range correlations between variables emerge, and the reconstruction threshold. In this paper we prove these physics predictions for a broad class of random constraint satisfaction problems. Additionally, we obtain contiguity results that have implications for Bayesian inference tasks, a subject that has received a great deal of interest recently (e.g. Banks et al. 2016, Proc. 29th COLT).

The maximum size of an r-uniform hypergraph without a Berge cycle of length at least k has been determined for all k ≥ r + 3 by Füredi, Kostochka and Luo and for k < r (and k = r, asymptotically) by Kostochka and Luo. In this paper we settle the remaining cases: k = r + 1 and k = r + 2, proving a conjecture of Füredi, Kostochka and Luo.

An equitable colouring of a graph G is a vertex colouring where no two adjacent vertices are coloured the same and, additionally, the colour class sizes differ by at most 1. The equitable chromatic number χ=(G) is the minimum number of colours required for this. We study the equitable chromatic number of the dense random graph ${\mathcal{G}(n,m)}$ where $m = \left\lfloor {p\left( \matrix{ n \cr 2 \cr} \right)} \right\rfloor $ and 0 < p < 0.86 is constant. It is a well-known question of Bollobás [3] whether for p = 1/2 there is a function f(n) → ∞ such that, for any sequence of intervals of length f(n), the normal chromatic number of ${\mathcal{G}(n,m)}$ lies outside the intervals with probability at least 1/2 if n is large enough. Bollobás proposes that this is likely to hold for f(n) = log n. We show that for the equitable chromatic number, the answer to the analogous question is negative. In fact, there is a subsequence ${({n_j})_j}_{ \in {\mathbb {N}}}$ of the integers where $\chi_=({\mathcal{G}(n_j,m_j)})$ is concentrated on exactly one explicitly known value. This constitutes surprisingly narrow concentration since in this range the equitable chromatic number, like the normal chromatic number, is rather large in absolute value, namely asymptotically equal to n/(2logbn) where b = 1/(1 − p).

For a finite group $G$, let $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E5}(G)$ denote the character graph built on the set of degrees of the irreducible complex characters of $G$. In this paper, we obtain a necessary and sufficient condition which guarantees that the complement of the character graph $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E5}(G)$ of a finite group $G$ is a nonbipartite Hamiltonian graph.

The separation dimension of a graph G is the minimum positive integer d for which there is an embedding of G into ℝd, such that every pair of disjoint edges are separated by some axis-parallel hyperplane. We prove a conjecture of Alon et al. [SIAM J. Discrete Math. 2015] by showing that every graph with maximum degree Δ has separation dimension less than 20Δ, which is best possible up to a constant factor. We also prove that graphs with separation dimension 3 have bounded average degree and bounded chromatic number, partially resolving an open problem by Alon et al. [J. Graph Theory 2018].