Bojan Mohar

For a graph $G$, let $λ_1(G)$ and $λ_2(G)$ denote the largest and the second largest adjacency eigenvalue of $G$. The sum $λ_1(G) + λ_2(G)$ is called the \emph{spectral sum} of $G$. We investigate the spectral sum of trees of order $n$ and determine the extremal trees that achieve maximum/minimum. Moreover, for any $α\in [0,1]$, we determine the extremal trees which maximize the convex combination $αλ_1 + (1-α)λ_2$ in the class of $n$-vertex trees.

A colouring of a graph $G$ has clustering $k$ if the maximum number of vertices in a monochromatic component equals $k$. Motivated by recent results showing that many natural graph classes are subgraphs of the strong product of a graph with bounded treewidth and a path, this paper studies clustered colouring of strong products of two bounded treewidth graphs, where none, one, or both graphs have bounded degree. For example, in the case of two colours, if $n$ is the number of vertices in the product, then we show that clustering $\Theta(n^{2/3})$ is best possible, even if one of the graphs is a path. However, if both graphs have bounded degree, then clustering $\Theta(n^{1/2})$ is best possible. With three colours, if one of the graphs has bounded degree, then we show that clustering $\Theta(n^{3/7})$ is best possible. However, if neither graph has bounded degree, then clustering $\Omega(n^{1/2})$ is necessary. More general bounds for any given number of colours are also presented.

Let $G$ be a graph of order $n$ with eigenvalues $\lambda_1 \geq \cdots \geq\lambda_n$. Let \[s^+(G)=\sum_{\lambda_i>0} \lambda_i^2, \qquad s^-(G)=\sum_{\lambda_i<0} \lambda_i^2.\] The smaller value, $s(G)=\min\{s^+(G), s^-(G)\}$ is called the square energy of $G$. In 2016, Elphick, Farber, Goldberg, and Wocjan conjectured that for every connected graph $G$ of order $n$, $s(G)\geq n-1.$ No linear bound for $s(G)$ in terms of $n$ is known. Let $H_1, \ldots, H_k$ be disjoint induced subgraphs of $G$. In this note, we prove that \[s^+(G)\geq\sum_{i=1}^{k} s^+(H_i) \quad \text{ and } \quad s^-(G)\geq\sum_{i=1}^{k} s^-(H_i),\] and then use this result to prove that $s(G)\geq \frac{3n}{4}$ for every connected graph $G$ of order $n\ge 4$.

Let $G$ be a simple graph of order $n$ with eigenvalues $λ_1(G)\geq \cdots \geq λ_n(G)$. Define \[s^+(G)=\sum_{λ_i >0} λ_i^2(G), \quad s^-(G)=\sum_{λ_i<0} λ_i^2(G).\] It was conjectured by Elphick, Farber, Goldberg and Wocjan that for every connected graph $G$ of order $n$, $s^+(G) \ge n-1.$ We verify this conjecture for graphs with domination number at most 2. We then strengthen the conjecture as follows: if $G$ is a connected graph of order $n$ and size $m \geq n+1$, then $s^+(G) \geq n$. We prove this conjecture for claw-free graphs and graphs with diameter 2.

We prove that every cyclically 4-edge-connected cubic graph that can be embedded in the torus, with the exceptional graph class called "Petersen-like", is 3-edge-colorable. This means every (non-trivial) toroidal snark can be obtained from several copies of the Petersen graph using the dot product operation. The first two snarks in this family are the Petersen graph and one of Blanuša snarks; the rest are exposed by Vodopivec in 2008. This proves a strengthening of the well-known, long-standing conjecture of Grünbaum from 1968. This implies that a 2-connected cubic (multi)graph that can be embedded in the torus is not 3-edge-colorable if and only if it can be obtained from a dot product of copies of the Petersen graph by replacing its vertices with 2-edge-connected planar cubic (multi)graphs. Here, replacing a vertex $v$ in a cubic graph $G$ is the operation that takes a 2-connected planar cubic multigraph $H$ and one of its vertices $u$ of degree 3, unifying $G-v$ and $H-u$ and connecting the neighbors of $v$ in $G-v$ with the neighbors of $u$ in $H-u$ with a matching. This result is a highly nontrivial generalization of the Four Color Theorem, and its proof requires a combination of extensive computer verification and computer-free extension of existing proofs on colorability. An important consequence of this result is a very strong version of the Tutte 4-Flow Conjecture for toroidal graphs. We show that a 2-edge connected graph embedded in the torus admits a nowhere-zero 4-flow unless it is Petersen-like (in which case it does not admit nowhere-zero 4-flows). Observe that this is a vast strengthening over the Tutte 4-Flow Conjecture on the torus, which assumes that the graph does not contain the Petersen graph as a minor because almost all toroidal graphs contain the Petersen graph minor, but almost none are Petersen-like.

A map is a \(2\) -cell decomposition of a closed compact surface, i.e., an embedding of a graph such that every face is homeomorphic to an open disc. An automorphism of a map can be thought of as a permutation of the vertices, which preserves the vertex-edge-face incidences in the embedding. Every automorphism of a map determines an angle-preserving homeomorphism of the surface. While it is conjectured that there is no “truly subquadratic” algorithm for testing map isomorphism for unconstrained genus, we present a linear-time algorithm for computing the generators of the automorphism group of a map on an orientable surface of genus \(g\neq 0\) , parametrized by the genus \(g\) . A map on an orientable surface is uniform if the cyclic vector of sizes of faces incident to a vertex \(v\) does not depend on the choice of \(v\) . The algorithm applies a sequence of local reductions and produces a uniform map while preserving the automorphism group. The automorphism group of the original map can be reconstructed from the automorphism group of the associated uniform map in linear time. We also extend the algorithm to non-orientable surfaces by making use of the antipodal double-cover. The algorithm can be used to solve the map isomorphism problem between maps (orientable or non-orientable) of bounded negative Euler characteristic.

The main results of this paper provide an Efficient Polynomial-Time Approximation Scheme (EPTAS) for approximating the genus (and non-orientable genus) of dense graphs. By dense we mean that \(|E(G)|\ge \alpha \, |V(G)|^2\) for some fixed \(\alpha \gt 0\) . While a constant-factor approximation is trivial for this class of graphs, approximations with factor arbitrarily close to 1 need a sophisticated algorithm and complicated mathematical justification. More precisely, we provide an algorithm that for a given (dense) graph G of order n and given \(\varepsilon \gt 0\) , returns an integer g such that G has an embedding in a surface of genus g , and this is ɛ-close to a minimum genus embedding in the sense that the minimum genus \(\mathsf {g}(G)\) of G satisfies: \(\mathsf {g}(G)\le g\le (1+\varepsilon)\mathsf {g}(G)\) . The running time of the algorithm is \(O(f(\varepsilon)\,n^2)\) , where \(f(\cdot)\) is an explicit function. Next, we extend this algorithm to also output an embedding (rotation system) whose genus is g . This second algorithm is an Efficient Polynomial-time Randomized Approximation Scheme (EPRAS) and runs in time \(O(f_1(\varepsilon)\,n^2)\) . Our algorithms are based on the analysis of minimum genus embeddings of quasirandom graphs. We use a general notion of quasirandom graphs [ 25 ]. We start with a regular partition obtained via an algorithmic version of the Szemerédi Regularity Lemma (due to Frieze and Kannan [ 17 ] and to Fox, Lovász, and Zhao [ 14 , 15 ]). We then partition the input graph into a bounded number of quasirandom subgraphs, which are preselected in such a way that they admit embeddings using as many triangles and quadrangles as faces as possible. Here we provide an ɛ-approximation \(\nu (G)\) for the maximum number of edge-disjoint triangles in G . The value \(\nu (G)\) can be computed by solving a linear program whose size is bounded by certain value \(f_2(\varepsilon)\) depending only on ɛ. After solving the linear program, the genus can be approximated (see Corollary 1.7 ). The proof of this result is long and will be of independent interest in topological graph theory.