We investigate the list packing number of a graph, the least $k$ such that there are always $k$ disjoint proper list-colourings whenever we have lists all of size $k$ associated to the vertices. We are curious how the behaviour of the list packing number contrasts with that of the list chromatic number, particularly in the context of bounded degree graphs. The main question we pursue is whether every graph with maximum degree $\Delta$ has list packing number at most $\Delta +1$. Our results highlight the subtleties of list packing and the barriers to, for example, pursuing a Brooks’-type theorem for the list packing number.

We give a simple method to estimate the number of distinct copies of some classes of spanning subgraphs in hypergraphs with a high minimum degree. In particular, for each $k\geq 2$ and $1\leq \ell \leq k-1$, we show that every $k$-graph on $n$ vertices with minimum codegree at least

\begin{equation*} \left \{\begin {array}{l@{\quad}l} \left (\dfrac {1}{2}+o(1)\right )n & \text { if }(k-\ell )\mid k,\\[5pt] \left (\dfrac {1}{\lceil \frac {k}{k-\ell }\rceil (k-\ell )}+o(1)\right )n & \text { if }(k-\ell )\nmid k, \end {array} \right . \end{equation*}

$\exp\!(n\log n-\Theta (n))$

$\ell$

$(k-\ell )\mid n$

$(k-\ell )\mid k$

$(k-\ell )\nmid k$

$\ell \lt k/2$

Given a graph $F$, we consider the problem of determining the densest possible pseudorandom graph that contains no copy of $F$. We provide an embedding procedure that improves a general result of Conlon, Fox, and Zhao which gives an upper bound on the density. In particular, our result implies that optimally pseudorandom graphs with density greater than $n^{-1/3}$ must contain a copy of the Peterson graph, while the previous best result gives the bound $n^{-1/4}$. Moreover, we conjecture that the exponent $1/3$ in our bound is tight. We also construct the densest known pseudorandom $K_{2,3}$-free graphs that are also triangle-free. Finally, we give a different proof for the densest known construction of clique-free pseudorandom graphs due to Bishnoi, Ihringer, and Pepe that they have no large clique.

Many problems and conjectures in extremal combinatorics concern polynomial inequalities between homomorphism densities of graphs where we allow edges to have real weights. Using the theory of graph limits, we can equivalently evaluate polynomial expressions in homomorphism densities on kernels W, that is, symmetric, bounded and measurable functions W from $[0,1]^2 \to \mathbb {R}$. In 2011, Hatami and Norin proved a fundamental result that it is undecidable to determine the validity of polynomial inequalities in homomorphism densities for graphons (i.e., the case where the range of W is $[0,1]$, which corresponds to unweighted graphs or, equivalently, to graphs with edge weights between $0$ and $1$). The corresponding problem for more general sets of kernels, for example, for all kernels or for kernels with range $[-1,1]$, remains open. For any $a> 0$, we show undecidability of polynomial inequalities for any set of kernels which contains all kernels with range $\{0,a\}$. This result also answers a question raised by Lovász about finding computationally effective certificates for the validity of homomorphism density inequalities in kernels.

In 1964, Erdős proposed the problem of estimating the Turán number of the d-dimensional hypercube $Q_d$. Since $Q_d$ is a bipartite graph with maximum degree d, it follows from results of Füredi and Alon, Krivelevich, Sudakov that $\mathrm {ex}(n,Q_d)=O_d(n^{2-1/d})$. A recent general result of Sudakov and Tomon implies the slightly stronger bound $\mathrm {ex}(n,Q_d)=o(n^{2-1/d})$. We obtain the first power-improvement for this old problem by showing that $\mathrm {ex}(n,Q_d)=O_d\left (n^{2-\frac {1}{d-1}+\frac {1}{(d-1)2^{d-1}}}\right )$. This answers a question of Liu. Moreover, our techniques give a power improvement for a larger class of graphs than cubes.

We use a similar method to prove that any n-vertex, properly edge-coloured graph without a rainbow cycle has at most $O(n(\log n)^2)$ edges, improving the previous best bound of $n(\log n)^{2+o(1)}$ by Tomon. Furthermore, we show that any properly edge-coloured n-vertex graph with $\omega (n\log n)$ edges contains a cycle which is almost rainbow: that is, almost all edges in it have a unique colour. This latter result is tight.

Let G be a graph with m edges, minimum degree $\delta $ and containing no cycle of length 4. Answering a question of Bollobás and Scott, Fan et al. [‘Bisections of graphs without short cycles’, Combinatorics, Probability and Computing 27(1) (2018), 44–59] showed that if (i) G is $2$-connected, or (ii) $\delta \ge 3$, or (iii) $\delta \ge 2$ and the girth of G is at least 5, then G admits a bisection such that $\max \{e(V_1),e(V_2)\}\le (1/4+o(1))m$, where $e(V_i)$ denotes the number of edges of G with both ends in $V_i$. Let $s\ge 2$ be an integer. In this note, we prove that if $\delta \ge 2s-1$ and G contains no $K_{2,s}$ as a subgraph, then G admits a bisection such that $\max \{e(V_1),e(V_2)\}\le (1/4+o(1))m$.

We show that for every $\eta \gt 0$ every sufficiently large $n$-vertex oriented graph $D$ of minimum semidegree exceeding $(1+\eta )\frac k2$ contains every balanced antidirected tree with $k$ edges and bounded maximum degree, if $k\ge \eta n$. In particular, this asymptotically confirms a conjecture of the first author for long antidirected paths and dense digraphs.

Further, we show that in the same setting, $D$ contains every $k$-edge antidirected subdivision of a sufficiently small complete graph, if the paths of the subdivision that have length $1$ or $2$ span a forest. As a special case, we can find all antidirected cycles of length at most $k$.

Finally, we address a conjecture of Addario-Berry, Havet, Linhares Sales, Reed, and Thomassé for antidirected trees in digraphs. We show that this conjecture is asymptotically true in $n$-vertex oriented graphs for all balanced antidirected trees of bounded maximum degree and of size linear in $n$.

For a graph $H$ and a hypercube $Q_n$, $\textrm{ex}(Q_n, H)$ is the largest number of edges in an $H$-free subgraph of $Q_n$. If $\lim _{n \rightarrow \infty } \textrm{ex}(Q_n, H)/|E(Q_n)| \gt 0$, $H$ is said to have a positive Turán density in a hypercube or simply a positive Turán density; otherwise, it has zero Turán density. Determining $\textrm{ex}(Q_n, H)$ and even identifying whether $H$ has a positive or zero Turán density remains a widely open question for general $H$. By relating extremal numbers in a hypercube and certain corresponding hypergraphs, Conlon found a large class of graphs, ones having so-called partite representation, that have zero Turán density. He asked whether this gives a characterisation, that is, whether a graph has zero Turán density if and only if it has partite representation. Here, we show that, as suspected by Conlon, this is not the case. We give an example of a class of graphs which have no partite representation, but on the other hand, have zero Turán density. In addition, we show that any graph whose every block has partite representation has zero Turán density in a hypercube.

Let $\boldsymbol {k} := (k_1,\ldots ,k_s)$ be a sequence of natural numbers. For a graph G, let $F(G;\boldsymbol {k})$ denote the number of colourings of the edges of G with colours $1,\dots ,s$ such that, for every $c \in \{1,\dots ,s\}$, the edges of colour c contain no clique of order $k_c$. Write $F(n;\boldsymbol {k})$ to denote the maximum of $F(G;\boldsymbol {k})$ over all graphs G on n vertices. There are currently very few known exact (or asymptotic) results for this problem, posed by Erdős and Rothschild in 1974. We prove some new exact results for $n \to \infty $:

1. (i) A sufficient condition on $\boldsymbol {k}$ which guarantees that every extremal graph is a complete multipartite graph, which systematically recovers all existing exact results.

2. (ii) Addressing the original question of Erdős and Rothschild, in the case $\boldsymbol {k}=(3,\ldots ,3)$ of length $7$, the unique extremal graph is the complete balanced $8$-partite graph, with colourings coming from Hadamard matrices of order $8$.

3. (iii) In the case $\boldsymbol {k}=(k+1,k)$, for which the sufficient condition in (i) does not hold, for $3 \leq k \leq 10$, the unique extremal graph is complete k-partite with one part of size less than k and the other parts as equal in size as possible.

Given a fixed graph $H$ and a constant $c \in [0,1]$, we can ask what graphs $G$ with edge density $c$ asymptotically maximise the homomorphism density of $H$ in $G$. For all $H$ for which this problem has been solved, the maximum is always asymptotically attained on one of two kinds of graphs: the quasi-star or the quasi-clique. We show that for any $H$ the maximising $G$ is asymptotically a threshold graph, while the quasi-clique and the quasi-star are the simplest threshold graphs, having only two parts. This result gives us a unified framework to derive a number of results on graph homomorphism maximisation, some of which were also found quite recently and independently using several different approaches. We show that there exist graphs $H$ and densities $c$ such that the optimising graph $G$ is neither the quasi-star nor the quasi-clique (Day and Sarkar, SIAM J. Discrete Math. 35(1), 294–306, 2021). We also show that for $c$ large enough all graphs $H$ maximise on the quasi-clique (Gerbner et al., J. Graph Theory 96(1), 34–43, 2021), and for any $c \in [0,1]$ the density of $K_{1,2}$ is always maximised on either the quasi-star or the quasi-clique (Ahlswede and Katona, Acta Math. Hung. 32(1–2), 97–120, 1978). Finally, we extend our results to uniform hypergraphs.

The well-known Erdős-Hajnal conjecture states that for any graph $F$, there exists $\epsilon \gt 0$ such that every $n$-vertex graph $G$ that contains no induced copy of $F$ has a homogeneous set of size at least $n^{\epsilon }$. We consider a variant of the Erdős-Hajnal problem for hypergraphs where we forbid a family of hypergraphs described by their orders and sizes. For graphs, we observe that if we forbid induced subgraphs on $m$ vertices and $f$ edges for any positive $m$ and $0\leq f \leq \binom{m}{2}$, then we obtain large homogeneous sets. For triple systems, in the first nontrivial case $m=4$, for every $S \subseteq \{0,1,2,3,4\}$, we give bounds on the minimum size of a homogeneous set in a triple system where the number of edges spanned by every four vertices is not in $S$. In most cases the bounds are essentially tight. We also determine, for all $S$, whether the growth rate is polynomial or polylogarithmic. Some open problems remain.

We show that for any $\varepsilon \gt 0$ and $\Delta \in \mathbb{N}$, there exists $\alpha \gt 0$ such that for sufficiently large $n$, every $n$-vertex graph $G$ satisfying that $\delta (G)\geq \varepsilon n$ and $e(X, Y)\gt 0$ for every pair of disjoint vertex sets $X, Y\subseteq V(G)$ of size $\alpha n$ contains all spanning trees with maximum degree at most $\Delta$. This strengthens a result of Böttcher, Han, Kohayakawa, Montgomery, Parczyk, and Person.

We show that for every $n\in \mathbb N$ and $\log n\le d\lt n$, if a graph $G$ has $N=\Theta (dn)$ vertices and minimum degree $(1+o(1))\frac{N}{2}$, then it contains a spanning subdivision of every $n$-vertex $d$-regular graph.

We study the following rainbow version of subgraph containment problems in a family of (hyper)graphs, which generalizes the classical subgraph containment problems in a single host graph. For a collection $\mathit {\mathbf {G}}=\{G_1, G_2,\ldots , G_{m}\}$ of not necessarily distinct k-graphs on the same vertex set $[n]$, a (sub)graph H on $[n]$ is rainbow if there exists an injection $\varphi : E(H)\rightarrow [m]$, such that $e\in E(G_{\varphi (e)})$ for each $e\in E(H)$. Note that if $|E(H)|=m$, then $\varphi $ is a bijection, and thus H contains exactly one edge from each $G_i$.

Our main results focus on rainbow clique-factors in (hyper)graph systems with minimum d-degree conditions. Specifically, we establish the following:

1. (1) A rainbow analogue of an asymptotical version of the Hajnal–Szemerédi theorem, namely, if $t\mid n$ and $\delta (G_i)\geq (1-\frac {1}{t}+\varepsilon )n$ for each $i\in [\frac {n}{t}\binom {t}{2}]$, then $\mathit {\mathbf {G}}$ contains a rainbow $K_t$-factor;

2. (2) Essentially, a minimum d-degree condition forcing a perfect matching in a k-graph also forces rainbow perfect matchings in k-graph systems for $d\in [k-1]$.

The degree assumptions in both results are asymptotically best possible (although the minimum d-degree condition forcing a perfect matching in a k-graph is in general unknown). For (1), we also discuss two directed versions and a multipartite version. Finally, to establish these results, we in fact provide a general framework to attack this type of problem, which reduces it to subproblems with finitely many colors.

A set of vertices in a graph is a Hamiltonian subset if it induces a subgraph containing a Hamiltonian cycle. Kim, Liu, Sharifzadeh, and Staden proved that for large $d$, among all graphs with minimum degree $d$, $K_{d+1}$ minimises the number of Hamiltonian subsets. We prove a near optimal lower bound that takes also the order and the structure of a graph into account. For many natural graph classes, it provides a much better bound than the extremal one ($\approx 2^{d+1}$). Among others, our bound implies that an $n$-vertex $C_4$-free graph with minimum degree $d$ contains at least $n2^{d^{2-o(1)}}$ Hamiltonian subsets.

In this note, we bound the metric dimension of the circulant graphs $C_n(1,2,\ldots ,t)$. We shall prove that if $n=2tk+t$ and if t is odd, then $\dim (C_n(1,2,\ldots ,t))=t+1$, which confirms Conjecture 4.1.1 in Chau and Gosselin (2017, Opuscula Mathematica 37, 509–534). In Vetrík (2017, Canadian Mathematical Bulletin 60, 206–216; 2020, Discussiones Mathematicae. Graph Theory 40, 67–76), the author has shown that $\dim (C_n(1,2,\ldots ,t))\leq t+\left \lceil \frac {p}{2}\right \rceil $ for $n=2tk+t+p$, where $t\geq 4$ is even, $1\leq p\leq t+1$, and $k\geq 1$. Inspired by his work, we show that $\dim (C_n(1,2,\ldots ,t))\leq t+\left \lfloor \frac {p}{2}\right \rfloor $ for $n=2tk+t+p$, where $t\geq 5$ is odd, $2\leq p\leq t+1$, and $k\geq 2$.

We show that an $n$-uniform maximal intersecting family has size at most $e^{-n^{0.5+o(1)}}n^n$. This improves a recent bound by Frankl ((2019) Comb. Probab. Comput. 28(5) 733–739.). The Spread Lemma of Alweiss et al. ((2020) Proceedings of the 52nd Annual ACM SIGACT Symposium on Theory of Computing.) plays an important role in the proof.

An n-vertex graph is called C-Ramsey if it has no clique or independent set of size $C\log _2 n$ (i.e., if it has near-optimal Ramsey behavior). In this paper, we study edge statistics in Ramsey graphs, in particular obtaining very precise control of the distribution of the number of edges in a random vertex subset of a C-Ramsey graph. This brings together two ongoing lines of research: the study of ‘random-like’ properties of Ramsey graphs and the study of small-ball probability for low-degree polynomials of independent random variables.

The proof proceeds via an ‘additive structure’ dichotomy on the degree sequence and involves a wide range of different tools from Fourier analysis, random matrix theory, the theory of Boolean functions, probabilistic combinatorics and low-rank approximation. In particular, a key ingredient is a new sharpened version of the quadratic Carbery–Wright theorem on small-ball probability for polynomials of Gaussians, which we believe is of independent interest. One of the consequences of our result is the resolution of an old conjecture of Erdős and McKay, for which Erdős reiterated in several of his open problem collections and for which he offered one of his notorious monetary prizes.

In this paper, we completely resolve the well-known problem of Erdős and Sauer from 1975 which asks for the maximum number of edges an n-vertex graph can have without containing a k-regular subgraph, for some fixed integer $k\geq 3$. We prove that any n-vertex graph with average degree at least $C_k\log \log n$ contains a k-regular subgraph. This matches the lower bound of Pyber, Rödl and Szemerédi and substantially improves an old result of Pyber, who showed that average degree at least $C_k\log n$ is enough.

Our method can also be used to settle asymptotically a problem raised by Erdős and Simonovits in 1970 on almost regular subgraphs of sparse graphs and to make progress on the well-known question of Thomassen from 1983 on finding subgraphs with large girth and large average degree.

Which patterns must a two-colouring of $K_n$ contain if each vertex has at least $\varepsilon n$ red and $\varepsilon n$ blue neighbours? We show that when $\varepsilon \gt 1/4$, $K_n$ must contain a complete subgraph on $\Omega (\log n)$ vertices where one of the colours forms a balanced complete bipartite graph.

When $\varepsilon \leq 1/4$, this statement is no longer true, as evidenced by the following colouring $\chi$ of $K_n$. Divide the vertex set into $4$ parts nearly equal in size as $V_1,V_2,V_3, V_4$, and let the blue colour class consist of the edges between $(V_1,V_2)$, $(V_2,V_3)$, $(V_3,V_4)$, and the edges contained inside $V_2$ and inside $V_3$. Surprisingly, we find that this obstruction is unique in the following sense. Any two-colouring of $K_n$ in which each vertex has at least $\varepsilon n$ red and $\varepsilon n$ blue neighbours (with $\varepsilon \gt 0$) contains a vertex set $S$ of order $\Omega _{\varepsilon }(\log n)$ on which one colour class forms a balanced complete bipartite graph, or which has the same colouring as $\chi$.