Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 September 2022
We suggest two related conjectures dealing with the existence of spanning irregular subgraphs of graphs. The first asserts that any $d$ -regular graph on $n$ vertices contains a spanning subgraph in which the number of vertices of each degree between $0$ and $d$ deviates from $\frac{n}{d+1}$ by at most $2$ . The second is that every graph on $n$ vertices with minimum degree $\delta$ contains a spanning subgraph in which the number of vertices of each degree does not exceed $\frac{n}{\delta +1}+2$ . Both conjectures remain open, but we prove several asymptotic relaxations for graphs with a large number of vertices $n$ . In particular we show that if $d^3 \log n \leq o(n)$ then every $d$ -regular graph with $n$ vertices contains a spanning subgraph in which the number of vertices of each degree between $0$ and $d$ is $(1+o(1))\frac{n}{d+1}$ . We also prove that any graph with $n$ vertices and minimum degree $\delta$ contains a spanning subgraph in which no degree is repeated more than $(1+o(1))\frac{n}{\delta +1}+2$ times.
Research supported in part by NSF grant DMS-2154082 and BSF grant 2018267.
Research supported by NSF Award DMS-1953958.