Archive for the ‘2009’ Category

Hee-Kap Ahn (안희갑), The discrete Fréchet distance with imprecise input

Friday, September 4th, 2009
The discrete Fréchet distance with imprecise input
Hee-Kap Ahn (안희갑)
Department of Computer Science & Engineering, POSTECH, Pohang
2009/9/11 Friday 4PM-5PM

In shape matching, we are given two geometric objects and we compute their distance according to some geometric similarity measure. The Fréchet distance is a natural distance function for continuous shapes such as curves and surfaces, and is defined using reparameterizations of the shapes.

The discrete Fréchet distance is a variant of the Fréchet distance in which we only consider vertices of polygonal curves. In this talk, we consider the problem of computing the discrete Fréchet distance between two polygonal curves when their vertices are imprecise, and describe efficient algorithms for the problem.

Jeong Ok Choi (최정옥), Forbidden subposets for fractional weak discrepancy at most k

Thursday, August 20th, 2009
Forbidden subposets for fractional weak discrepancy at most k
Jeong Ok Choi (최정옥)
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
2009/8/28 Friday 4PM-5PM

The fractional weak discrepancy of a poset (partially ordered set) P, written wd(P), is the least k such that some f:P\to\mathbb{R} satisfies f(y)-f(x)≤1 for x\prec y and |f(y)-f(x)|≤k for x|y. Minimal forbidden subposets are often called obstructions. Shuchat, Shull, and Trenk determined the obstructions for the property wd(P)<1: the obstructions are 2+2 and 3+1. We determine the obstructions for the property wd(P)≤k when k is an integer. In this talk, the complete collection of the obstructions for wd(P)≤k for each k≥2 – which is an infinite set – will be discussed.

This is joint work with Douglas B. West.

Choongbum Lee (이중범), Resilient pancyclicity of random graphs

Friday, July 17th, 2009
Resilient pancyclicity of random graphs
Choongbum Lee (이중범)
Department of Mathematics, UCLA, Los Angeles, USA
2009/7/31 Thursday 4PM-5PM

A graph G on n vertices is pancyclic if it contains cycles of length t for all 3 \leq t \leq n. We prove that for any fixed \epsilon>0, the random graph G(n,p) with p(n)\gg n^{-1/2} asymptotically almost surely has the following resilience property. If H is a subgraph of G with maximum degree at most (1/2 - \epsilon)np then G-H is pancyclic. In fact, we prove a more general result which says that if p \gg n^{-1+1/(l-1)} for some integer l \geq 3 then for any \epsilon>0, asymptotically almost surely every subgraph of G(n,p) with minimum degree greater than (1/2+\epsilon)np contains cycles of length t for all l \leq t \leq n. These results are tight in two ways. First, the condition on p essentially cannot be relaxed. Second, it is impossible to improve the constant 1/2 in the assumption for the minimum degree.

Joint work with Michael Krivelevich and Benny Sudakov

(Colloquium) Paul Seymour, Well-quasi-ordering tournaments and Rao’s degree-sequence conjecture

Saturday, May 16th, 2009
FYI (Department Colloquium)
Well-quasi-ordering tournaments and Rao’s degree-sequence conjecture
Paul Seymour
Department of Mathematics, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, USA.
2009/5/21 Thursday 4:30PM-5:30PM (Room 1501)

Rao conjectured about 1980 that in every infinite set of degree sequences (of graphs), there are two degree sequences with graphs one of which is an induced subgraph of the other. We recently found a proof, and we sketch the main ideas.

The problem turns out to be related to ordering digraphs by immersion (vertices are mapped to vertices, and edges to edge-disjoint directed paths). Immersion is not a well-quasi-order for the set of all digraphs, but for certain restricted sets (for instance, the set of tournaments) we prove it is a well-quasi-order.

The connection between Rao’s conjecture and digraph immersion is as follows. One key lemma reduces Rao’s conjecture to proving the same assertion for degree sequences of split graphs (a split graph is a graph whose vertex set is the union of a clique and a stable set); and to handle split graphs it helps to encode the split graph as a directed complete bipartite graph, and to replace Rao’s containment relation with immersion.

(Joint with Maria Chudnovsky, Columbia)

Maria Chudnovsky, Packing seagulls in graphs with no stable set of size three

Monday, April 13th, 2009
Packing seagulls in graphs with no stable set of size three
Maria Chudnovsky
Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research & Department of Mathematics, Columbia University, New York, USA
2009/5/21 Thursday 2PM-3PM

Hadwiger’s conjecture is a well known open problem in graph theory. It states that every graph with chromatic number k, contains a certain structure, called a “clique minor” of size k. An interesting special case of the conjecture, that is still wide open, is when the graph G does not contain three pairwise non-adjacent vertices. In this case, it should be true that G contains a clique minor of size t where t = \lceil |V(G)|/2 \rceil. This remains open, but Jonah Blasiak proved it in the subcase when |V(G)| is even and the vertex set of G is the union of three cliques. Here we prove a strengthening of Blasiak’s result: that the conjecture holds if some clique in G contains at least |V(G)|/4 vertices.

This is a consequence of a result about packing “seagulls”. A seagull in G is an induced three-vertex path. It is not known in general how to decide in polynomial time whether a graph contains k pairwise disjoint seagulls; but we answer this for graphs with no stable sets of size three.

This is joint work with Paul Seymour.