In this note, I will present some new problems, and also some old ones which, in my opinion, have been undeservedly forgotten or neglected.

Kleitman's conjecture concerning the ‘Kleitman–West problem’ is false for 3-element subsets.

We prove a joint local limit law for the distribution of the r largest components of decomposable logarithmic combinatorial structures, including assemblies, multisets and selections. Our method is entirely probabilistic, and requires only weak conditions that may readily be verified in practice.

Let C(G) denote the number of simple cycles of a graph G and let C(n) be the maximum of C(G) over all planar graphs with n nodes. We present a lower bound on C(n), constructing graphs with at least 2.28n cycles. Applying some probabilistic arguments we prove an upper bound of 3.37n.

We also discuss this question restricted to the subclasses of grid graphs, bipartite graphs, and 3-colourable triangulated graphs.

We prove an Erdős–Ko–Rado-type theorem for intersecting k-chains of subspaces of a finite vector space. This is the q-generalization of earlier results of Erdős, Seress and Székely for intersecting k-chains of subsets of an underlying set. The proof hinges on the author's proper generalization of the shift technique from extremal set theory to finite vector spaces, which uses a linear map to define the generalized shift operation. The theorem is the following.

For c = 0, 1, consider k-chains of subspaces of an n-dimensional vector space over GF(q), such that the smallest subspace in any chain has dimension at least c, and the largest subspace in any chain has dimension at most n − c. The largest number of such k-chains under the condition that any two share at least one subspace as an element of the chain, is achieved by the following constructions:

(1) fix a subspace of dimension c and take all k-chains containing it,

(2) fix a subspace of dimension n − c and take all k-chains containing it.

In this paper we analyse the expected depth of random circuits of fixed fanin f. Such circuits are built a gate at a time, with the f inputs of each new gate being chosen randomly from among the previously added gates. The depth of the new gate is defined to be one more than the maximal depth of its input gates. We show that the expected depth of a random circuit with n gates is bounded from above by ef ln n and from below by 2.04 … f ln n.

We show that the Poisson–Dirichlet distribution is the distribution of points in a scale-invariant Poisson process, conditioned on the event that the sum T of the locations of the points in (0,1] is 1. This extends to a similar result, rescaling the locations by T, and conditioning on the event that T[les ]1. Restricting both processes to (0, β] for 0<β[les ]1, we give an explicit formula for the total variation distance between their distributions. Connections between various representations of the Poisson–Dirichlet process are discussed.

A simple geometric argument establishes an inequality between the sums of two pairs of first-passage times. This result is used to prove monotonicity, convexity and concavity results for first-passage times with cylinder and half-space restrictions.

We present a general algebraic technique and discuss some of its numerous applications in combinatorial number theory, in graph theory and in combinatorics. These applications include results in additive number theory and in the study of graph colouring problems. Many of these are known results, to which we present unified proofs, and some results are new.

It has been conjectured that a connected matroid with largest circuit size c [ges ] 2 and largest cocircuit size c* [ges ] 2 has at most ½cc* elements. Pou-Lin Wu has shown that this conjecture holds for graphic matroids. We prove two special cases of the conjecture, not restricted to graphic matroids, thereby providing the first nontrivial evidence that the conjecture is true for non-graphic matroids. Specifically, we prove the special case of the conjecture in which c = 4 or c* = 4. We also prove the special case for binary matroids with c = 5 or c* = 5.

This paper begins with the observation that half of all graphs containing no induced path of length 3 are disconnected. We generalize this in several directions. First, we give necessary and sufficient conditions (in terms of generating functions) for the probability of connectedness in a suitable class of graphs to tend to a limit strictly between zero and one. Next we give a general framework in which this and related questions can be posed, involving operations on classes of finite structures. Finally, we discuss briefly an algebra associated with such a class of structures, and give a conjecture about its structure.

We consider the problem of determining the maximum number N(m, k, r) of columns of a 0−1 matrix with m rows and exactly r ones in each column such that every k columns are linearly independent over ℤ2. For fixed integers k[ges ]4 and r[ges ]2, where k is even and gcd(k−1, r) = 1, we prove the lower bound N(m, k, r) = Ω(mkr/2(k−1) ·(ln m)1/k−1). This improves on earlier results from [14] by a factor Θ((ln m)1/k−1). Moreover, we describe a polynomial time algorithm achieving this new lower bound.

We show that, if M is a connected binary matroid of cogirth at least five which does not have both an F7-minor and an F*7-minor, then M has a circuit C such that M − C is connected and r(M − C) = r(M).

Total path length, or search cost, for a rooted tree is defined as the sum of all root-to-node distances. Let Tn be the total path length for a random recursive tree of order n. Mahmoud [10] showed that Wn := (Tn − E[Tn])/n converges almost surely and in L2 to a nondegenerate limiting random variable W. Here we give recurrence relations for the moments of Wn and of W and show that Wn converges to W in Lp for each 0 < p < ∞. We confirm the conjecture that the distribution of W is not normal. We also show that the distribution of W is characterized among all distributions having zero mean and finite variance by the distributional identity

formula here

where [Escr ](x) := − x ln x − (1 minus; x) ln(1 − x) is the binary entropy function, U is a uniform (0, 1) random variable, W* and W have the same distribution, and U, W and W* are mutually independent. Finally, we derive an approximation for the distribution of W using a Pearson curve density estimator.

A tight upper bound on the number of elements in a connected matroid with fixed rank and largest cocircuit size is given. This upper bound is used to show that a connected matroid with at least thirteen elements contains either a circuit or a cocircuit with at least six elements. In the language of matroid Ramsey numbers, n(6, 6) = 13: this is the largest currently known matroid Ramsey number.

For a graph G on vertex set V = {1, …, n} let k = (k1, …, kn) be an integral vector such that 1 [les ] ki [les ] di for i ∈ V, where di is the degree of the vertex i in G. A k-dominating set is a set Dk ⊆ V such that every vertex i ∈ V[setmn ]Dk has at least ki neighbours in Dk. The k-domination number γk(G) of G is the cardinality of a smallest k-dominating set of G.

For k1 = · · · = kn = 1, k-domination corresponds to the usual concept of domination. Our approach yields an improvement of an upper bound for the domination number found by N. Alon and J. H. Spencer.

If ki = di for i = 1, …, n, then the notion of k-dominating set corresponds to the complement of an independent set. A function fk(p) is defined, and it will be proved that γk(G) = min fk(p), where the minimum is taken over the n-dimensional cube Cn = {p = (p1, …, pn) [mid ] pi ∈ ℝ, 0 [les ] pi [les ] 1, i = 1, …, n}. An [Oscr ](Δ22Δn-algorithm is presented, where Δ is the maximum degree of G, with INPUT: p ∈ Cn and OUTPUT: a k-dominating set Dk of G with [mid ]Dk[mid ][les ]fk(p).

In the present paper we consider compound Poisson approximation by Stein's method for dissociated random variables. We present some applications to problems in system reliability. In particular, our examples have the structure of an incomplete U-statistics. We mainly apply techniques from Barbour and Utev, who gave new bounds for the solutions of the Stein equation in compound Poisson approximation in two recent papers.

Consider a finite alphabet Ω and strings consisting of elements from Ω. For a given string w, let cor(w) denote the autocorrelation, which can be seen as a measure of the amount of overlap in w. Furthermore, let aw(n) be the number of strings of length n that do not contain w as a substring. Eriksson [4] stated the following conjecture: if cor(w)>cor(w′), thenaw(n)>aw′(n) from the first n where equality no longer holds. We prove that this is true if [mid ]Ω[mid ][ges ]3, by giving a lower bound for aw(n)−aw′(n).

We define a polynomial W on graphs with colours on the edges, by generalizing the spanning tree expansion of the Tutte polynomial as far as possible: we give necessary and sufficient conditions on the edge weights for this expansion not to depend on the order used. We give a contraction-deletion formula for W analogous to that for the Tutte polynomial, and show that any coloured graph invariant satisfying such a formula can be obtained from W. In particular, we show that generalizations of the Tutte polynomial obtained from its rank generating function formulation, or from a random cluster model, can be obtained from W. Finally, we find the most general conditions under which W gives rise to a link invariant, and give as examples the one-variable Jones polynomial, and an invariant taking values in ℤ/22ℤ.

As a consequence of an early result of Pach we show that every maximal triangle-free graph is either homomorphic with a member of a specific infinite sequence of graphs or contains the Petersen graph minus one vertex as a subgraph. From this result and further structural observations we derive that, if a (not necessarily maximal) triangle-free graph of order n has minimum degree δ[ges ]n/3, then the graph is either homomorphic with a member of the indicated family or contains the Petersen graph with one edge contracted. As a corollary we get a recent result due to Chen, Jin and Koh. Finally, we show that every triangle-free graph with δ>n/3 is either homomorphic with C5 or contains the Möbius ladder. A major tool is the observation that every triangle-free graph with δ[ges ]n/3 has a unique maximal triangle-free supergraph.