In this paper we study a Haagerup inequality in the general case of discrete groupoids. We develop two geometrical tools, pinching and tetrahedral change of faces, based on deformation of triangles, to prove it. We show how to use these tools to find all the already known results just by manipulating triangles. We use these tools for groups acting freely and by isometries on the set of vertices of any affine building and give a first reduction of this inequality to its verification on some special triangles and prove the inequality when the building is of type $\tilde{A}_{k_1}\times\cdots\times\tilde{A}_{k_n}$, where $k_i\in\{1,2\}$, $i=1,\dots,n$.

The relative trace formula is a tool in the theory of automorphic forms which was invented by Jacquet in order to study period integrals and relate them to Langlands functoriality. In this paper we give an analogue of Arthur’s spectral expansion of the trace formula to the relative setup in the context of $\text{GL}_n$. This is an important step toward application of the relative trace formula and it extends earlier work by several authors to higher rank. Our method is new and based on complex analysis and majorization of Eisenstein series. To that end we use recent lower bounds of Brumley for Rankin–Selberg $L$-functions at the edge of the critical strip.

An infinite regular two-dimensional network is composed of unit resistances joining adjacent nodes. What is the resistance of the whole network measured between two different nodes? Three cases are considered, in which the meshes of the network are square, hexagonal or triangular. Some extensions of the problem are also treated. Asymptotic approximations are given for large distances.

For a random permutation of $n$ objects, as $n \to \infty$, the process giving the proportion of elements in the longest cycle, the second-longest cycle, and so on, converges in distribution to the Poisson–Dirichlet process with parameter 1. This was proved in 1977 by Kingman and by Vershik and Schmidt. For soft reasons, this is equivalent to the statement that the random permutations and the Poisson–Dirichlet process can be coupled so that zero is the limit of the expected $\ell_1$ distance between the process of cycle length proportions and the Poisson–Dirichlet process. We investigate how rapid this metric convergence can be, and in doing so, give two new proofs of the distributional convergence.

One of the couplings we consider has an analogue for the prime factorizations of a uniformly distributed random integer, and these couplings rely on the ‘scale-invariant spacing lemma’ for the scale-invariant Poisson processes, proved in this paper.

We put the final piece into a puzzle first introduced by Bollobás, Erdõs and Szemerédi in 1975. For arbitrary positive integers $n$ and $r$ we determine the largest integer $\Delta=\Delta (r,n)$, for which any $r$-partite graph with partite sets of size $n$ and of maximum degree less than $\Delta$ has an independent transversal. This value was known for all even $r$. Here we determine the value for odd $r$ and find that $\Delta(r,n)=\Delta(r-1,n)$. Informally this means that the addition of an oddth partite set does not make it any harder to guarantee an independent transversal.

In the proof we establish structural theorems which could be of independent interest. They work for all$r\geq 7$, and specify the structure of slightly sub-optimal graphs for even$r\geq 8$.

We show that a maximum cut of a random graph below the giant-component threshold can be found in linear space and linear expected time by a simple algorithm. In fact, the algorithm solves a more general class of problems, namely binary 2-variable constraint satisfaction problems. In addition to Max Cut, such Max 2-CSPs encompass Max Dicut, Max 2-Lin, Max 2-Sat, Max-Ones-2-Sat, maximum independent set, and minimum vertex cover. We show that if a Max 2-CSP instance has an ‘underlying’ graph which is a random graph $G \in \mathcal{G}(n,c/n)$, then the instance is solved in linear expected time if $c \leq 1$. Moreover, for arbitrary values (or functions) $c>1$ an instance is solved in expected time $n \exp(O(1+(c-1)^3 n))$; in the ‘scaling window’ $c=1+\lambda n^{-1/3}$ with $\lambda$ fixed, this expected time remains linear.

Our method is to show, first, that if a Max 2-CSP has a connected underlying graph with $n$ vertices and $m$ edges, then $O(n 2^{(m-n)/2})$ is a deterministic upper bound on the solution time. Then, analysing the tails of the distribution of this quantity for a component of a random graph yields our result. Towards this end we derive some useful properties of binomial distributions and simple random walks.

We study relational structures (especially graphs and posets) which satisfy the analogue of homogeneity but for homomorphisms rather than isomorphisms. The picture is rather different. Our main results are partial characterizations of countable graphs and posets with this property; an analogue of Fraïssé's theorem; and representations of monoids as endomorphism monoids of such structures.

In this paper, we give sharp upper bounds on the maximum number of edges in very unbalanced bipartite graphs not containing any cycle of length 6. To prove this, we estimate roughly the sum of the sizes of the hyperedges in triangle-free multi-hypergraphs.

The adaption of combinatorial duality to infinite graphs has been hampered by the fact that while cuts (or cocycles) can be infinite, cycles are finite. We show that these obstructions fall away when duality is reinterpreted on the basis of a ‘singular’ approach to graph homology, whose cycles are defined topologically in a space formed by the graph together with its ends and can be infinite. Our approach enables us to complete Thomassen's results about ‘finitary’ duality for infinite graphs to full duality, including his extensions of Whitney's theorem.

In this paper, I give a short proof of a recent result by Sokal, showing that all zeros of the chromatic polynomial $P_G(q)$ of a finite graph $G$ of maximal degree $D$ lie in the disk $|q|< K D$, where $K$ is a constant that is strictly smaller than 8.

In the present work we prove the following conjecture of Erdős, Roth, Sárközy and T. Sós: Let $f$ be a polynomial of integer coefficients such that $2|f(z)$ for some integer $z$. Then, for any $k$-colouring of the integers, the equation $x+y=f(z)$ has a solution in which $x$ and $y$ have the same colour. A well-known special case of this conjecture referred to the case $f(z)=z^2$.