A conjecture of Erdős, Gyárfás, and Pyber says that in any edge-colouring of a complete graph with r colours, it is possible to cover all the vertices with r vertexdisjoint monochromatic cycles. So far, this conjecture has been proven only for r = 2. In this paper we show that in fact this conjecture is false for all r ≥ 3. In contrast to this, we show that in any edge-colouring of a complete graph with three colours, it is possible to cover all the vertices with three vertex-disjoint monochromatic paths, proving a particular case of a conjecture due to Gyárfás. As an intermediate result we show that in any edge-colouring of the complete graph with the colours red and blue, it is possible to cover all the vertices with a red path, and a disjoint blue balanced complete bipartite graph. * Research supported by the LSE postgraduate research studentship scheme. arXiv:1205.5492v1 [math.CO]
A subgraph of an edge-coloured complete graph is called rainbow if all its edges have different colours. In 1980 Hahn conjectured that every properly edge-coloured complete graph Kn has a rainbow Hamiltonian path. Although this conjecture turned out to be false, it was widely believed that such a colouring always contains a rainbow cycle of length almost n. In this paper, improving on several earlier results, we confirm this by proving that every properly edge-coloured Kn has a rainbow cycle of length n − O(n 3/4 ). One of the main ingredients of our proof, which is of independent interest, shows that a random subgraph of a properly edge-coloured Kn formed by the edges of a random set of colours has a similar edge distribution as a truly random graph with the same edge density. In particular it has very good expansion properties.
A subgraph of an edge‐coloured graph is called rainbow if all its edges have distinct colours. The study of rainbow subgraphs goes back more than 200 years to the work of Euler on Latin squares and has been the focus of extensive research ever since. Euler posed a problem equivalent to finding properly n‐edge‐coloured complete bipartite graphs Kn,n which can be decomposed into rainbow perfect matchings. While there are proper edge‐colourings of Kn,n without even a single rainbow perfect matching, the theme of this paper is to show that with some very weak additional constraints one can find many disjoint rainbow perfect matchings. In particular, we prove that if some fraction of the colour classes have at most (1−o(1))n edges, then one can nearly‐decompose the edges of Kn,n into edge‐disjoint perfect rainbow matchings. As an application of this, we establish in a very strong form a conjecture of Akbari and Alipour and asymptotically prove a conjecture of Barat and Nagy. Both these conjectures concern rainbow perfect matchings in edge‐colourings of Kn,n with quadratically many colours. The above result also has implications to some conjectures of Snevily about subsquares of multiplication tables of groups. Finally, using our techniques, we also prove a number of results on near‐decompositions of graphs into other rainbow structures like Hamiltonian cycles and spanning trees. Most notably, we prove that any properly coloured complete graph can be nearly‐decomposed into spanning rainbow trees. This asymptotically proves the Brualdi–Hollingsworth and Kaneko–Kano–Suzuki conjectures which predict that a perfect decomposition should exist under the same assumptions.
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Ryser's Conjecture states that for any r-partite r-uniform hypergraph, the vertex cover number is at most r−1 times the matching number. This conjecture is only known to be true for r ≤ 3 in general and for r ≤ 5 if the hypergraph is intersecting. There has also been considerable effort made for finding hypergraphs that are extremal for Ryser's Conjecture, i.e. r-partite hypergraphs whose cover number is r − 1 times its matching number. Aside from a few sporadic examples, the set of uniformities r for which Ryser's Conjecture is known to be tight is limited to those integers for which a projective plane of order r − 1 exists.We produce a new infinite family of r-uniform hypergraphs extremal to Ryser's Conjecture, which exists whenever a projective plane of order r − 2 exists. Our construction is flexible enough to produce a large number of non-isomorphic extremal hypergraphs. In particular, we define what we call the Ryser poset of extremal intersecting r-partite r-uniform hypergraphs and show that the number of maximal and minimal elements is exponential in √ r.This provides further evidence for the difficulty of Ryser's Conjecture.
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