We present a method for obtaining upper bounds for the connective constant of self-avoiding walks. The method works for a large class of lattices, including all that have been studied in connection with self-avoiding walks. The bound is obtained as the largest eigenvalue of a certain matrix. Numerical application of the method has given improved bounds for all lattices studied, e.g. μ < 2.696 for the square lattice, μ < 4.278 for the triangular lattice and μ < 4.756 for the simple cubic lattice.

Let f(t) be the largest integer such that every graph with average degree t has a topological clique with f(i) vertices. It is widely believed that . Here we prove the weaker estimate .

We describe two computational methods for the construction of cubic graphs with given girth. These were used to produce two independent proofs that the (3,9)-cages, defined as the smallest cubic graphs of girth 9, have 58 vertices. There are exactly 18 such graphs. We also show that cubic graphs of girth 11 must have at least 106 vertices and cubic graphs of girth 13 must have at least 196 vertices.

Paul Erdős has conjectured that Menger's theorem extends to infinite graphs in the following way: whenever A, B are two sets of vertices in an infinite graph, there exist a set of disjoint A−B paths and an A−B separator in this graph such that the separator consists of a choice of precisely one vertex from each of the paths. We prove this conjecture for graphs that contain a set of disjoint paths to B from all but countably many vertices of A. In particular, the conjecture is true when A is countable.

We show that, for any finite set P of points in the plane and for any integer k ≥ 2, there is a finite set R = R(P, k) with the following property: for any k-colouring of R there is a monochromatic set , ⊆ R, such that is combinatorially equivalent to the set P, and the convex hull of P contains no point of R \ . We also consider related questions for colourings of p-element subsets of R (p > 1), and show that these analogues have negative solutions.

In this paper we prove that given a finite collection of finite graphs, and the subsets of vertices of a random graph G that induce those graphs, it is almost always possible to uniquely reconstruct a class of graphs equivalent to G.

Analogues of the Erdős-Ko-Rado theorem are proved for the Boolean algebra of all subsets of {1,…n} and in this algebra truncated by the removal of the empty set and the whole set.

We show by elementary methods that given any finite partition of the set ℕ of positive integers, there is one cell that is both additively and multiplicatively rich. In particular, this cell must contain a sequence and all of its finite sums, and another sequence and all of its finite products, a fact that was previously known only by utilizing the algebraic structure of the Stone–Čech compactification βℕ of ℕ.

Notions of deletion and contraction for the class of set functions from finite sets into the integers are defined. An operation on a subclass of such set functions is a function from the subclass into itself that preserves ground sets and respects isomorphism. The operations on set functions that interchange deletion and contraction are characterised, as are those with the further property of being involutary. Similar results are given for polymatroids. There is a unique involutary operation on the class of k-polymatroids that interchanges deletion and contraction. The results generalise those of Kung [3].

A polynomial-time randomised algorithm for uniformly generating forests in a dense graph is presented. Using this, a fully polynomial randomised approximation scheme (fpras) for counting the number of forests in a dense graph is created.

The partition number of a product hypergraph is introduced as the minimal size of a partition of its vertex set into sets that are edges. This number is shown to be multiplicative if all factors are graphs with all loops included.

Jackson [10] gave a polynomial sufficient condition for a bipartite tournament to contain a cycle of a given length. The question arises as to whether deciding on the maximum length of a cycle in a bipartite tournament is polynomial. The problem was considered by Manoussakis [12] in the slightly more general setting of 2-edge coloured complete graphs: is it polynomial to find a longest alternating cycle in such coloured graphs? In this paper, strong evidence is given that such an algorithm exists. In fact, using a reduction to the well known exact matching problem, we prove that the problem is random polynomial.

Dowling lattices are a class of geometric lattices, based on groups, which have been shown to share many properties with projective geometries. In this paper we show that the automorphisms of Dowling lattices are analogs of the automorphisms of projective geometries. We also treat similar results for several related geometric lattices.

A harmonious colouring of a simple graph G is a proper vertex colouring such that each pair of colours appears together on at most one edge. The harmonious chromatic number h(G) is the least number of colours in such a colouring.

For any positive integer m, let Q(m) be the least positive integer k such that ≥ m. We show that for almost all unlabelled, unrooted trees T, h(T) = Q(m), where m is the number of edges of T.