A tree functional is called additive if it satisfies a recursion of the form $F(T) = \sum_{j=1}^k F(B_j) + f(T)$, where B1, …, Bk are the branches of the tree T and f (T) is a toll function. We prove a general central limit theorem for additive functionals of d-ary increasing trees under suitable assumptions on the toll function. The same method also applies to generalized plane-oriented increasing trees (GPORTs). One of our main applications is a log-normal law that we prove for the size of the automorphism group of d-ary increasing trees, but other examples (old and new) are covered as well.

For an edge-coloured graph G, the minimum colour degree of G means the minimum number of colours on edges which are incident to each vertex of G. We prove that if G is an edge-coloured graph with minimum colour degree at least 5, then V(G) can be partitioned into two parts such that each part induces a subgraph with minimum colour degree at least 2. We show this theorem by proving amuch stronger form. Moreover, we point out an important relationship between our theorem and Bermond and Thomassen’s conjecture in digraphs.

The aim of this paper is to prove an inequality between relative entropy and the sum of average conditional relative entropies of the following form: for a fixed probability measure q on , ( is a finite set), and any probability measure on , (*)

$$D(p||q){\rm{\le}}C \cdot \sum\limits_{i = 1}^n {{\rm{\mathbb{E}}}_p D(p_i ( \cdot |Y_1 ,{\rm{ }}...,{\rm{ }}Y_{i - 1} ,{\rm{ }}Y_{i + 1} ,...,{\rm{ }}Y_n )||q_i ( \cdot |Y_1 ,{\rm{ }}...,{\rm{ }}Y_{i - 1} ,{\rm{ }}Y_{i + 1} ,{\rm{ }}...,{\rm{ }}Y_n )),} $$

The inequality (*) ismeaningful in product spaces, in both the discrete and the continuous case, and can be used to prove a logarithmic Sobolev inequality for q, provided uniform logarithmic Sobolev inequalities are available for qi(· |x1, …, xi−1, xi+1, …, xn), for all fixed i and fixed (x1, …, xi−1, xi+1, …, xn). Inequality (*) directly implies that the Gibbs sampler associated with q is a contraction for relative entropy.

In this paper we derive inequality (*), and thereby a logarithmic Sobolev inequality, in discrete product spaces, by proving inequalities for an appropriate Wasserstein-like distance.

We prove that the number of multigraphs with vertex set {1, . . ., n} such that every four vertices span at most nine edges is an2+o(n2) where a is transcendental (assuming Schanuel's conjecture from number theory). This is an easy consequence of the solution to a related problem about maximizing the product of the edge multiplicities in certain multigraphs, and appears to be the first explicit (somewhat natural) question in extremal graph theory whose solution is transcendental. These results may shed light on a question of Razborov, who asked whether there are conjectures or theorems in extremal combinatorics which cannot be proved by a certain class of finite methods that include Cauchy–Schwarz arguments.

Our proof involves a novel application of Zykov symmetrization applied to multigraphs, a rather technical progressive induction, and a straightforward use of hypergraph containers.

Let G(n,M) be a uniform random graph with n vertices and M edges. Let ${\wp_{n,m}}$ be the maximum block size of G(n,M), that is, the maximum size of its maximal 2-connected induced subgraphs. We determine the expectation of ${\wp_{n,m}}$ near the critical point M = n/2. When n − 2M ≫ n2/3, we find a constant c1 such that

$$c_1 = \lim_{n \rightarrow \infty} \left({1 - \frac{2M}{n}} \right) \,\E({\wp_{n,m}}).$$

$$c_2(\lambda) = \lim_{n \rightarrow \infty} \frac{\E{\left({\wp_{n,{{(n/2)}({1+\lambda n^{-1/3}})}}}\right)}}{n^{1/3}}.$$

$n^{-1/3}\,\E{\left({\wp_{n,{{(n/2)}({1+\lambda n^{-1/3}})}}}\right)}$

The strong chromatic number χs(G) of a graph G on n vertices is the least number r with the following property: after adding $r\lceil n/r\rceil-n$ isolated vertices to G and taking the union with any collection of spanning disjoint copies of Kr in the same vertex set, the resulting graph has a proper vertex colouring with r colours. We show that for every c > 0 and every graph G on n vertices with Δ(G) ≥ cn, χs(G) ≤ (2+o(1))Δ(G), which is asymptotically best possible.

We provide a deterministic algorithm that finds, in ɛ-O(1)n2 time, an ɛ-regular Frieze–Kannan partition of a graph on n vertices. The algorithm outputs an approximation of a given graph as a weighted sum of ɛ-O(1) many complete bipartite graphs.

As a corollary, we give a deterministic algorithm for estimating the number of copies of H in an n-vertex graph G up to an additive error of at most ɛnv(H), in time ɛ-OH(1)n2.

In r-neighbour bootstrap percolation on the vertex set of a graph G, a set A of initially infected vertices spreads by infecting, at each time step, all uninfected vertices with at least r previously infected neighbours. When the elements of A are chosen independently with some probability p, it is natural to study the critical probability pc(G, r) at which it becomes likely that all of V(G) will eventually become infected. Improving a result of Balogh, Bollobás and Morris, we give a bound on the second term in the expansion of the critical probability when G = [n]d and d ⩾ r ⩾ 2. We show that for all d ⩾ r ⩾ 2 there exists a constant cd,r > 0 such that if n is sufficiently large, then

$$p_c (\left[ n \right]^d ,{\rm{ }}r){\rm{\le }}\left( {\frac{{\lambda (d,r)}}{{\log _{(r - 1)} (n)}} - \frac{{c_{d,r} }}{{(\log _{(r - 1)} (n))^{3/2} }}} \right)^{d - r + 1} ,$$

where λ(d, r) is an exact constant and log(k) (n) denotes the k-times iterated natural logarithm of n.

An (improper) graph colouring has defect d if each monochromatic subgraph has maximum degree at most d, and has clustering c if each monochromatic component has at most c vertices. This paper studies defective and clustered list-colourings for graphs with given maximum average degree. We prove that every graph with maximum average degree less than (2d+2)/(d+2)k is k-choosable with defect d. This improves upon a similar result by Havet and Sereni (J. Graph Theory, 2006). For clustered choosability of graphs with maximum average degree m, no (1-ɛ)m bound on the number of colours was previously known. The above result with d=1 solves this problem. It implies that every graph with maximum average degree m is $\lfloor{\frac{3}{4}m+1}\rfloor$-choosable with clustering 2. This extends a result of Kopreski and Yu (Discrete Math., 2017) to the setting of choosability. We then prove two results about clustered choosability that explore the trade-off between the number of colours and the clustering. In particular, we prove that every graph with maximum average degree m is $\lfloor{\frac{7}{10}m+1}\rfloor$-choosable with clustering 9, and is $\lfloor{\frac{2}{3}m+1}\rfloor$-choosable with clustering O(m). As an example, the later result implies that every biplanar graph is 8-choosable with bounded clustering. This is the best known result for the clustered version of the earth–moon problem. The results extend to the setting where we only consider the maximum average degree of subgraphs with at least some number of vertices. Several applications are presented.