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Computer scientists are speed demons. When we are confronted by acomputational problem that we need to solve, we want to solve that problemas quickly as possible. That “need for speed” has driven muchof the advancement in computation over the last 50 years. We discover fasterways of solving important problems: developing data structures that supportapparently instantaneous search of billions of tweets or billions of userson a social networking site; or discovering new, faster algorithms thatsolve practical problems—such as finding shorter routes for deliverydrivers or encrypting packets to be sent over the internet.
Logic is the study of truth and falsity, of theorem and proof, of validreasoning in any context. It’s also the foundation of all of computerscience, the very reasoning that you use when you write the condition of anif statement in a Java program, or when you design an algorithm to beat agrandmaster at chess. More concretely, logic is also the foundation of allcomputers. At its heart, a computer is a collection ofcarefully arranged wires that transport electrons (which serve as a physicalmanifestation of information) and “gates” (which serve asphysical manifestations of logical operations to manipulate thoseelectrons).
This book has introduced the mathematical foundations of computerscience—the conceptual building blocks of, among other things, thelarge, complex computational systems that have become central aspects of ourdaily lives, some of which have already genuinely and meaningfully improvedthe world in their own unique ways, profound and small. Understanding andreasoning about these fundamental building blocks is necessary for you tounderstand, develop, and evaluate the key ideas of these many newapplications of computer science, and introducing these foundations has beenthe underlying goal of this book.
In computer science, a graph means a network: a collectionof things (people, web pages, subway stations, animal species, . . .) wheresome pairs of those things are joined by some kind of pairwise relationship(spent more than 15 minutes inside an enclosed space with, has a [hyper]linkto, is the stop before/after on some subway line, is a predator of, . . .).It’s possible to make graphs sound hopelessly abstract and utterlyuninteresting—a graph is a pair〈V, E〉, where V is a nonemptycollection of entities called nodes and E is acollection of edges that join pairs ofnodes—but graphs are fascinating whenever the entities andthe relationship represented by the edges are themselves interesting!Here are just a few examples.
Recursion is a powerful technique in computer science. If wecan express a solution to problem X in terms of solutionsto smaller instances of the same problem X—and wecan solve X directly for the “smallest”inputs—then we can solve X for all inputs. There aremany examples. We can sort an array A by sorting the lefthalf of A and the right half of A andmerging the results together; 1-element arrays are by definition alreadysorted. (That’s merge sort.)
Let $G=(S,T,E)$ be a bipartite graph. For a matching $M$ of $G$, let $V(M)$ be the set of vertices covered by $M$, and let $B(M)$ be the symmetric difference of $V(M)$ and $S$. We prove that if $M$ is a uniform random matching of $G$, then $B(M)$ satisfies the BK inequality for increasing events.
Given a graph $H$ and a positive integer $n$, the Turán number$\mathrm{ex}(n,H)$ is the maximum number of edges in an $n$-vertex graph that does not contain $H$ as a subgraph. A real number $r\in (1,2)$ is called a Turán exponent if there exists a bipartite graph $H$ such that $\mathrm{ex}(n,H)=\Theta (n^r)$. A long-standing conjecture of Erdős and Simonovits states that $1+\frac{p}{q}$ is a Turán exponent for all positive integers $p$ and $q$ with $q\gt p$.
In this paper, we show that $1+\frac{p}{q}$ is a Turán exponent for all positive integers $p$ and $q$ with $q \gt p^{2}$. Our result also addresses a conjecture of Janzer [18].
The clustered chromatic number of a class of graphs is the minimum integer $k$ such that for some integer $c$ every graph in the class is $k$-colourable with monochromatic components of size at most $c$. We determine the clustered chromatic number of any minor-closed class with bounded treedepth, and prove a best possible upper bound on the clustered chromatic number of any minor-closed class with bounded pathwidth. As a consequence, we determine the fractional clustered chromatic number of every minor-closed class.
We study the problem of finding pairwise vertex-disjoint triangles in the randomly perturbed graph model, which is the union of any $n$-vertex graph $G$ satisfying a given minimum degree condition and the binomial random graph $G(n,p)$. We prove that asymptotically almost surely $G \cup G(n,p)$ contains at least $\min \{\delta (G), \lfloor n/3 \rfloor \}$ pairwise vertex-disjoint triangles, provided $p \ge C \log n/n$, where $C$ is a large enough constant. This is a perturbed version of an old result of Dirac.
Our result is asymptotically optimal and answers a question of Han, Morris, and Treglown [RSA, 2021, no. 3, 480–516] in a strong form. We also prove a stability version of our result, which in the case of pairwise vertex-disjoint triangles extends a result of Han, Morris, and Treglown [RSA, 2021, no. 3, 480–516]. Together with a result of Balogh, Treglown, and Wagner [CPC, 2019, no. 2, 159–176], this fully resolves the existence of triangle factors in randomly perturbed graphs.
We believe that the methods introduced in this paper are useful for a variety of related problems: we discuss possible generalisations to clique factors, cycle factors, and $2$-universality.
Percolation theory is a well studied process utilized by networks theory to understand the resilience of networks under random or targeted attacks. Despite their importance, spatial networks have been less studied under the percolation process compared to the extensively studied non-spatial networks. In this Element, the authors will discuss the developments and challenges in the study of percolation in spatial networks ranging from the classical nearest neighbors lattice structures, through more generalized spatial structures such as networks with a distribution of edge lengths or community structure, and up to spatial networks of networks.
In 1975 Bollobás, Erdős, and Szemerédi asked the following question: given positive integers $n, t, r$ with $2\le t\le r-1$, what is the largest minimum degree $\delta (G)$ among all $r$-partite graphs $G$ with parts of size $n$ and which do not contain a copy of $K_{t+1}$? The $r=t+1$ case has attracted a lot of attention and was fully resolved by Haxell and Szabó, and Szabó and Tardos in 2006. In this article, we investigate the $r\gt t+1$ case of the problem, which has remained dormant for over 40 years. We resolve the problem exactly in the case when $r \equiv -1 \pmod{t}$, and up to an additive constant for many other cases, including when $r \geq (3t-1)(t-1)$. Our approach utilizes a connection to the related problem of determining the maximum of the minimum degrees among the family of balanced $r$-partite $rn$-vertex graphs of chromatic number at most $t$.
A hypergraph $\mathcal{F}$ is non-trivial intersecting if every pair of edges in it have a nonempty intersection, but no vertex is contained in all edges of $\mathcal{F}$. Mubayi and Verstraëte showed that for every $k \ge d+1 \ge 3$ and $n \ge (d+1)k/d$ every $k$-graph $\mathcal{H}$ on $n$ vertices without a non-trivial intersecting subgraph of size $d+1$ contains at most $\binom{n-1}{k-1}$ edges. They conjectured that the same conclusion holds for all $d \ge k \ge 4$ and sufficiently large $n$. We confirm their conjecture by proving a stronger statement.
They also conjectured that for $m \ge 4$ and sufficiently large $n$ the maximum size of a $3$-graph on $n$ vertices without a non-trivial intersecting subgraph of size $3m+1$ is achieved by certain Steiner triple systems. We give a construction with more edges showing that their conjecture is not true in general.
We study several parameters of a random Bienaymé–Galton–Watson tree $T_n$ of size $n$ defined in terms of an offspring distribution $\xi$ with mean $1$ and nonzero finite variance $\sigma ^2$. Let $f(s)=\mathbb{E}\{s^\xi \}$ be the generating function of the random variable $\xi$. We show that the independence number is in probability asymptotic to $qn$, where $q$ is the unique solution to $q = f(1-q)$. One of the many algorithms for finding the largest independent set of nodes uses a notion of repeated peeling away of all leaves and their parents. The number of rounds of peeling is shown to be in probability asymptotic to $\log n/\log (1/f'(1-q))$. Finally, we study a related parameter which we call the leaf-height. Also sometimes called the protection number, this is the maximal shortest path length between any node and a leaf in its subtree. If $p_1 = \mathbb{P}\{\xi =1\}\gt 0$, then we show that the maximum leaf-height over all nodes in $T_n$ is in probability asymptotic to $\log n/\log (1/p_1)$. If $p_1 = 0$ and $\kappa$ is the first integer $i\gt 1$ with $\mathbb{P}\{\xi =i\}\gt 0$, then the leaf-height is in probability asymptotic to $\log _\kappa \log n$.
A conjecture of Alon, Krivelevich and Sudakov states that, for any graph $F$, there is a constant $c_F \gt 0$ such that if $G$ is an $F$-free graph of maximum degree $\Delta$, then $\chi\!(G) \leqslant c_F \Delta/ \log\!\Delta$. Alon, Krivelevich and Sudakov verified this conjecture for a class of graphs $F$ that includes all bipartite graphs. Moreover, it follows from recent work by Davies, Kang, Pirot and Sereni that if $G$ is $K_{t,t}$-free, then $\chi\!(G) \leqslant (t + o(1)) \Delta/ \log\!\Delta$ as $\Delta \to \infty$. We improve this bound to $(1+o(1)) \Delta/\log\!\Delta$, making the constant factor independent of $t$. We further extend our result to the DP-colouring setting (also known as correspondence colouring), introduced by Dvořák and Postle.
Let ${\mathbb{G}(n_1,n_2,m)}$ be a uniformly random m-edge subgraph of the complete bipartite graph ${K_{n_1,n_2}}$ with bipartition $(V_1, V_2)$, where $n_i = |V_i|$, $i=1,2$. Given a real number $p \in [0,1]$ such that $d_1 \,{:\!=}\, pn_2$ and $d_2 \,{:\!=}\, pn_1$ are integers, let $\mathbb{R}(n_1,n_2,p)$ be a random subgraph of ${K_{n_1,n_2}}$ with every vertex $v \in V_i$ of degree $d_i$, $i = 1, 2$. In this paper we determine sufficient conditions on $n_1,n_2,p$ and m under which one can embed ${\mathbb{G}(n_1,n_2,m)}$ into $\mathbb{R}(n_1,n_2,p)$ and vice versa with probability tending to 1. In particular, in the balanced case $n_1=n_2$, we show that if $p\gg\log n/n$ and $1 - p \gg \left(\log n/n \right)^{1/4}$, then for some $m\sim pn^2$, asymptotically almost surely one can embed ${\mathbb{G}(n_1,n_2,m)}$ into $\mathbb{R}(n_1,n_2,p)$, while for $p\gg\left(\log^{3} n/n\right)^{1/4}$ and $1-p\gg\log n/n$ the opposite embedding holds. As an extension, we confirm the Kim–Vu Sandwich Conjecture for degrees growing faster than $(n \log n)^{3/4}$.
We make the first steps towards generalising the theory of stochastic block models, in the sparse regime, towards a model where the discrete community structure is replaced by an underlying geometry. We consider a geometric random graph over a homogeneous metric space where the probability of two vertices to be connected is an arbitrary function of the distance. We give sufficient conditions under which the locations can be recovered (up to an isomorphism of the space) in the sparse regime. Moreover, we define a geometric counterpart of the model of flow of information on trees, due to Mossel and Peres, in which one considers a branching random walk on a sphere and the goal is to recover the location of the root based on the locations of leaves. We give some sufficient conditions for percolation and for non-percolation of information in this model.