Free binary systems are shown not to admit idempotent means. This refutes a conjecture of the author. It is also shown that the extension of Hindman’s theorem to nonassociative binary systems formulated and conjectured by the author is false.

Is there some absolute $\unicode[STIX]{x1D700}>0$ such that for any claw-free graph $G$, the chromatic number of the square of $G$ satisfies $\unicode[STIX]{x1D712}(G^{2})\leqslant (2-\unicode[STIX]{x1D700})\unicode[STIX]{x1D714}(G)^{2}$, where $\unicode[STIX]{x1D714}(G)$ is the clique number of $G$? Erdős and Nešetřil asked this question for the specific case where $G$ is the line graph of a simple graph, and this was answered in the affirmative by Molloy and Reed. We show that the answer to the more general question is also yes, and, moreover, that it essentially reduces to the original question of Erdős and Nešetřil.

Let $G$ be a claw-free graph on $n$ vertices with clique number $\unicode[STIX]{x1D714}$, and consider the chromatic number $\unicode[STIX]{x1D712}(G^{2})$ of the square $G^{2}$ of $G$. Writing $\unicode[STIX]{x1D712}_{s}^{\prime }(d)$ for the supremum of $\unicode[STIX]{x1D712}(L^{2})$ over the line graphs $L$ of simple graphs of maximum degree at most $d$, we prove that $\unicode[STIX]{x1D712}(G^{2})\leqslant \unicode[STIX]{x1D712}_{s}^{\prime }(\unicode[STIX]{x1D714})$ for $\unicode[STIX]{x1D714}\in \{3,4\}$. For $\unicode[STIX]{x1D714}=3$, this implies the sharp bound $\unicode[STIX]{x1D712}(G^{2})\leqslant 10$. For $\unicode[STIX]{x1D714}=4$, this implies $\unicode[STIX]{x1D712}(G^{2})\leqslant 22$, which is within 2 of the conjectured best bound. This work is motivated by a strengthened form of a conjecture of Erdős and Nešetřil.

We consider a problem introduced by Mossel and Ross (‘Shotgun assembly of labeled graphs’, arXiv:1504.07682). Suppose a random n × n jigsaw puzzle is constructed by independently and uniformly choosing the shape of each ‘jig’ from q possibilities. We are given the shuffled pieces. Then, depending on q, what is the probability that we can reassemble the puzzle uniquely? We say that two solutions of a puzzle are similar if they only differ by a global rotation of the puzzle, permutation of duplicate pieces, and rotation of rotationally symmetric pieces. In this paper, we show that, with high probability, such a puzzle has at least two non-similar solutions when 2 ⩽ q ⩽ 2e−1/2n, all solutions are similar when q ⩾ (2+ϵ)n, and the solution is unique when q = ω(n).

Suppose that N is 2-coloured. Then there are infinitely many monochromatic solutions to $x+y=z^{2}$. On the other hand, there is a 3-colouring of N with only finitely many monochromatic solutions to this equation.

We study the geometry of the component of the origin in the uniform spanning forest of $\mathbb{Z}^{d}$ and give bounds on the size of balls in the intrinsic metric.

We study the percolation model on Boltzmann triangulations using a generating function approach. More precisely, we consider a Boltzmann model on the set of finite planar triangulations, together with a percolation configuration (either site-percolation or bond-percolation) on this triangulation. By enumerating triangulations with boundaries according to both the boundary length and the number of vertices/edges on the boundary, we are able to identify a phase transition for the geometry of the origin cluster. For instance, we show that the probability that a percolation interface has length $n$ decays exponentially with $n$ except at a particular value $p_{c}$ of the percolation parameter $p$ for which the decay is polynomial (of order $n^{-10/3}$). Moreover, the probability that the origin cluster has size $n$ decays exponentially if $p<p_{c}$ and polynomially if $p\geqslant p_{c}$.

The critical percolation value is $p_{c}=1/2$ for site percolation, and $p_{c}=(2\sqrt{3}-1)/11$ for bond percolation. These values coincide with critical percolation thresholds for infinite triangulations identified by Angel for site-percolation, and by Angel and Curien for bond-percolation, and we give an independent derivation of these percolation thresholds.

Lastly, we revisit the criticality conditions for random Boltzmann maps, and argue that at $p_{c}$, the percolation clusters conditioned to have size $n$ should converge toward the stable map of parameter $\frac{7}{6}$ introduced by Le Gall and Miermont. This enables us to derive heuristically some new critical exponents.

A result of Haglund implies that the $(q,t)$-bigraded Hilbert series of the space of diagonal harmonics is a $(q,t)$-Ehrhart function of the flow polytope of a complete graph with netflow vector $(-n,1,\ldots ,1)$. We study the $(q,t)$-Ehrhart functions of flow polytopes of threshold graphs with arbitrary netflow vectors. Our results generalize previously known specializations of the mentioned bigraded Hilbert series at $t=1$, $0$, and $q^{-1}$. As a corollary to our results, we obtain a proof of a conjecture of Armstrong, Garsia, Haglund, Rhoades, and Sagan about the $(q,q^{-1})$-Ehrhart function of the flow polytope of a complete graph with an arbitrary netflow vector.

We study local properties of the Bakry–Émery curvature function ${\mathcal{K}}_{G,x}:(0,\infty ]\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ at a vertex $x$ of a graph $G$ systematically. Here ${\mathcal{K}}_{G,x}({\mathcal{N}})$ is defined as the optimal curvature lower bound ${\mathcal{K}}$ in the Bakry–Émery curvature-dimension inequality $CD({\mathcal{K}},{\mathcal{N}})$ that $x$ satisfies. We provide upper and lower bounds for the curvature functions, introduce fundamental concepts like curvature sharpness and $S^{1}$-out regularity, and relate the curvature functions of $G$ with various spectral properties of (weighted) graphs constructed from local structures of $G$. We prove that the curvature functions of the Cartesian product of two graphs $G_{1},G_{2}$ are equal to an abstract product of curvature functions of $G_{1},G_{2}$. We explore the curvature functions of Cayley graphs and many particular (families of) examples. We present various conjectures and construct an infinite increasing family of 6-regular graphs which satisfy $CD(0,\infty )$ but are not Cayley graphs.

We explicitly describe the isomorphism between two combinatorial realizations of Kashiwara’s infinity crystal in types B and C. The first realization is in terms of marginally large tableaux and the other is in terms of Kostant partitions coming from PBW bases. We also discuss a stack notation for Kostant partitions which simplifies that realization.

We investigate arithmetic, geometric and combinatorial properties of symmetric edge polytopes. We give a complete combinatorial description of their facets. By combining Gröbner basis techniques, half-open decompositions and methods for interlacing polynomials we provide an explicit formula for the $h^{\ast }$-polynomial in case of complete bipartite graphs. In particular, we show that the $h^{\ast }$-polynomial is $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FE}$-positive and real-rooted. This proves Gal’s conjecture for arbitrary flag unimodular triangulations in this case, and, beyond that, we prove a strengthening due to Nevo and Petersen [On $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FE}$-vectors satisfying the Kruskal–Katona inequalities. Discrete Comput. Geom.45(3) (2011), 503–521].

Motivated by the Erdős–Szekeres convex polytope conjecture in $\mathbb{R}^{d}$, we initiate the study of the following induced Ramsey problem for hypergraphs. Given integers $n>k\geqslant 5$, what is the minimum integer $g_{k}(n)$ such that any$k$-uniform hypergraph on $g_{k}(n)$ vertices with the property that any set of $k+1$ vertices induces 0, 2, or 4 edges, contains an independent set of size $n$. Our main result shows that $g_{k}(n)>2^{cn^{k-4}}$, where $c=c(k)$.

We discuss 1-factorizations of complete graphs that “match” a given Hadamard matrix. We prove the existence of these factorizations for two families of Hadamard matrices: Walsh matrices and certain Paley matrices.

We consider sequences of the form $(a_{n}\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC})_{n}$ mod 1, where $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}\in [0,1]$ and where $(a_{n})_{n}$ is a strictly increasing sequence of positive integers. If the asymptotic distribution of the pair correlations of this sequence follows the Poissonian model for almost all $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}$ in the sense of Lebesgue measure, we say that $(a_{n})_{n}$ has the metric pair correlation property. Recent research has revealed a connection between the metric theory of pair correlations of such sequences, and the additive energy of truncations of $(a_{n})_{n}$. Bloom, Chow, Gafni and Walker speculated that there might be a convergence/divergence criterion which fully characterizes the metric pair correlation property in terms of the additive energy, similar to Khintchine’s criterion in the metric theory of Diophantine approximation. In the present paper we give a negative answer to such speculations, by showing that such a criterion does not exist. To this end, we construct a sequence $(a_{n})_{n}$ having large additive energy which, however, maintains the metric pair correlation property.

We show that if a permutation $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70B}$ contains two intervals of length 2, where one interval is an ascent and the other a descent, then the Möbius function $\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}[1,\unicode[STIX]{x1D70B}]$ of the interval $[1,\unicode[STIX]{x1D70B}]$ is zero. As a consequence, we prove that the proportion of permutations of length $n$ with principal Möbius function equal to zero is asymptotically bounded below by $(1-1/e)^{2}\geqslant 0.3995$. This is the first result determining the value of $\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}[1,\unicode[STIX]{x1D70B}]$ for an asymptotically positive proportion of permutations $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70B}$. We further establish other general conditions on a permutation $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70B}$ that ensure $\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}[1,\unicode[STIX]{x1D70B}]=0$, including the occurrence in $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70B}$ of any interval of the form $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}\oplus 1\oplus \unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}$.

The lonely runner conjecture, now over fifty years old, concerns the following problem. On a unit-length circular track, consider $m$ runners starting at the same time and place, each runner having a different constant speed. The conjecture asserts that each runner is lonely at some point in time, meaning at a distance at least $1/m$ from the others. We formulate a function field analogue, and give a positive answer in some cases in the new setting.

Let C be a set of positive integers. In this paper, we obtain an algorithm for computing all subsets A of positive integers which are minimals with the condition that if x1 + … + xn is a partition of an element in C, then at least a summand of this partition belongs to A. We use techniques of numerical semigroups to solve this problem because it is equivalent to give an algorithm that allows us to compute all the numerical semigroups which are maximals with the condition that has an empty intersection with the set C.

A subset $A$ of a finite abelian group $G$ is called $(k,l)$-sum-free if the sum of $k$ (not necessarily distinct) elements of $A$ never equals the sum of $l$ (not necessarily distinct) elements of $A$. We find an explicit formula for the maximum size of a $(k,l)$-sum-free subset in $G$ for all $k$ and $l$ in the case when $G$ is cyclic by proving that it suffices to consider $(k,l)$-sum-free intervals in subgroups of $G$. This simplifies and extends earlier results by Hamidoune and Plagne [‘A new critical pair theorem applied to sum-free sets in abelian groups’, Comment. Math. Helv. 79(1) (2004), 183–207] and Bajnok [‘On the maximum size of a $(k,l)$-sum-free subset of an abelian group’, Int. J. Number Theory 5(6) (2009), 953–971].

For a graph $G$, let $f(G)$ denote the maximum number of edges in a bipartite subgraph of $G$. Given a fixed graph $H$ and a positive integer $m$, let $f(m,H)$ denote the minimum possible cardinality of $f(G)$, as $G$ ranges over all graphs on $m$ edges that contain no copy of $H$. Alon et al. [‘Maximum cuts and judicious partitions in graphs without short cycles’, J. Combin. Theory Ser. B 88 (2003), 329–346] conjectured that, for any fixed graph $H$, there exists an $\unicode[STIX]{x1D716}(H)>0$ such that $f(m,H)\geq m/2+\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FA}(m^{3/4+\unicode[STIX]{x1D716}})$. We show that, for any wheel graph $W_{2k}$ of $2k$ spokes, there exists $c(k)>0$ such that $f(m,W_{2k})\geq m/2+c(k)m^{(2k-1)/(3k-1)}\log m$. In particular, we confirm the conjecture asymptotically for $W_{4}$ and give general lower bounds for $W_{2k+1}$.

We give the generating function of split $(n+t)$-colour partitions and obtain an analogue of Euler’s identity for split $n$-colour partitions. We derive a combinatorial relation between the number of restricted split $n$-colour partitions and the function $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70E}_{k}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D707})=\sum _{d|\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}}d^{k}$. We introduce a new class of split perfect partitions with $d(a)$ copies of each part $a$ and extend the work of Agarwal and Subbarao [‘Some properties of perfect partitions’, Indian J. Pure Appl. Math 22(9) (1991), 737–743].