Let S and T be two sets of points in a metric space with a total of n points. Each point in S and T has an associated value that specifies an upper limit on how many points it can be matched with from the other set. A multimatching between S and T is a way of pairing points such that each point in S is matched with at least as many points in T as its assigned value, and vice versa for each point in T. The cost of a multimatching is defined as the sum of the distances between all matched pairs of points. The geometric multimatching problem seeks to find a multimatching that minimizes this cost. A special case where each point is matched to at most one other point is known as the geometric many-to-many matching problem. We present two results for these problems when the underlying metric space has a bounded doubling dimension. Specifically, we provide the first near-linear-time approximation scheme for the geometric multimatching problem in terms of the output size. Additionally, we improve upon the best-known approximation algorithm for the geometric many-to-many matching problem, previously introduced by Bandyapadhyay and Xue (SoCG 2024), which won the best paper award at SoCG 2024. This is joint work with Shinwoo An and Jie Xue.

What causes a graph to have high chromatic number? One obvious reason is containing a large clique (a set of pairwise adjacent vertices). This naturally leads to investigation of \(\chi\)-bounded classes of graphs — classes where a large clique is essentially the only reason for large chromatic number. Unfortunately, many interesting graph classes are not \(\chi\)-bounded. An eerily common obstruction to being \(\chi\)-bounded are the Burling graphs — a family of triangle-free graphs with unbounded chromatic number. These graphs have served as counterexamples in many settings: demonstrating that graphs excluding an induced subdivision of \(K_{5}\) are not \(\chi\)-bounded, that string graphs are not \(\chi\)-bounded, that intersection graphs of boxes in \({\mathbb{R}}^{3}\) are not \(\chi\)-bounded, and many others. In many of these cases, this sequence is the only known obstruction to \(\chi\)-boundedness. This led Chudnovsky, Scott, and Seymour to conjecture that any graph of sufficiently high chromatic number must either contain a large clique, an induced proper subdivision of a clique, or a large Burling graph as an induced subgraph. The prevailing belief was that this conjecture should be false. Somewhat surprisingly, we did manage to prove it under an extra assumption on the “locality” of the chromatic number — that the input graph belongs to a \(2\)-controlled family of graphs, where a high chromatic number is always certified by a ball of radius \(2\) with large chromatic number. In this talk, I will present this result and discuss its implications in structural graph theory, and algorithmic implications to colouring problems in specific graph families. This talk is based on joint work with Tara Abrishami, James Davies, Xiying Du, Jana Masaříková, Paweł Rzążewski, and Bartosz Walczak conducted during the STWOR2 workshop in Chęciny Poland.

A rooted spanning tree of a graph $G$ is called normal if the endvertices of all edges of $G$ are comparable in the tree order. It is well known that every finite connected graph has a normal spanning tree (also known as depth-first search tree). Also, all countable graphs have normal spanning trees, but uncountable complete graphs for example do not. In 2021, Pitz proved the following characterisation for graphs with normal spanning trees, which had been conjectured by Halin: A connected graph $G$ has a normal spanning tree if and only if every minor of $G$ has countable colouring number, i.e. there is a well-order of the vertices such that every vertex is preceded by only finitely many of its neighbours. More generally, a not necessarily spanning tree in $G$ is called normal if for every path $P$ in $G$ with both endvertices in $T$ but no inner vertices in $T$, the endvertices of $P$ are comparable in the tree order. We establish a local version of Pitz’s theorem by characterising for which sets $U$ of vertices of $G$ there is a normal tree in $G$ covering $U$. The results are joint work with Max Pitz.

By utilizing the recently developed hypergraph analogue of Godsil’s identity by the second author, we prove that for all $n \geq k \geq 2$, one can reconstruct the matching polynomial of an $n$-vertex $k$-uniform hypergraph from the multiset of all induced sub-hypergraphs on $\lfloor \frac{k-1}{k}n \rfloor + 1$ vertices. This generalizes the well-known result of Godsil on graphs in 1981 to every uniform hypergraph. As a corollary, we show that for every graph $F$, one can reconstruct the number of $F$-factors in a graph under analogous conditions. We also constructed examples that imply the number $\lfloor \frac{k-1}{k}n \rfloor + 1$ is the best possible for all $n\geq k \geq 2$ with $n$ divisible by $k$. This is joint work Donggyu Kim.

The dimension of a poset is the least integer $d$ such that the poset is isomorphic to a subposet of the product of $d$ linear orders. In 1983, Kelly constructed planar posets of arbitrarily large dimension. Crucially, the posets in his construction involve large standard examples, the canonical structure preventing a poset from having small dimension. Kelly’s construction inspired one of the most challenging questions in dimension theory: are large standard examples unavoidable in planar posets of large dimension? We answer the question affirmatively by proving that every $d$-dimensional planar poset contains a standard example of order $\Omega(d)$. More generally, we prove that every poset from Kelly’s construction appears in every poset with a planar cover graph of sufficiently large dimension. joint work with Heather Smith Blake, Jędrzej Hodor, Piotr Micek, and William T. Trotter.

Since the proof of the graph minor structure theorem by Robertson and Seymour in 2004, its underlying ideas have found applications in a much broader range of settings than their original context. They have driven profound progress in areas such as vertex minors, pivot minors, matroids, directed graphs, and 2-dimensional simplicial complexes. In this talk, I will present three open problems related to this development, each requiring some background.