In this paper we introduce some Christoffel–Darboux type identities for independence polynomials. As an application, we give a new proof of a theorem of Chudnovsky and Seymour, which states that the independence polynomial of a claw-free graph has only real roots. Another application is related to a conjecture of Merrifield and Simmons.

Two graphs G1 and G2 on n vertices are said to pack if there exist injective mappings of their vertex sets into [n] such that the images of their edge sets are disjoint. A longstanding conjecture due to Bollobás and Eldridge and, independently, Catlin, asserts that if (Δ(G1) + 1)(Δ(G2) + 1) ⩽ n + 1, then G1 and G2 pack. We consider the validity of this assertion under the additional assumption that G1 or G2 has bounded codegree. In particular, we prove for all t ⩾ 2 that if G1 contains no copy of the complete bipartite graph K2,t and Δ(G1) > 17t · Δ(G2), then (Δ(G1) + 1)(Δ(G2) + 1) ⩽ n + 1 implies that G1 and G2 pack. We also provide a mild improvement if moreover G2 contains no copy of the complete tripartite graph K1,1,s, s ⩾ 1.

In this paper we consider j-tuple-connected components in random k-uniform hypergraphs (the j-tuple-connectedness relation can be defined by letting two j-sets be connected if they lie in a common edge and considering the transitive closure; the case j = 1 corresponds to the common notion of vertex-connectedness). We show that the existence of a j-tuple-connected component containing Θ(nj) j-sets undergoes a phase transition and show that the threshold occurs at edge probability

$$\frac{(k-j)!}{\binom{k}{j}-1}n^{j-k}.$$

Our main original contribution is a bounded degree lemma, which controls the structure of the component grown in the search process.

We construct minor-closed addable families of graphs that are subcritical and contain all planar graphs. This contradicts (one direction of) a well-known conjecture of Noy.

It follows from known results that every regular tripartite hypergraph of positive degree, with n vertices in each class, has matching number at least n/2. This bound is best possible, and the extremal configuration is unique. Here we prove a stability version of this statement, establishing that every regular tripartite hypergraph with matching number at most (1 + ϵ)n/2 is close in structure to the extremal configuration, where ‘closeness’ is measured by an explicit function of ϵ.

We consider distance colourings in graphs of maximum degree at most d and how excluding one fixed cycle of length ℓ affects the number of colours required as d → ∞. For vertex-colouring and t ⩾ 1, if any two distinct vertices connected by a path of at most t edges are required to be coloured differently, then a reduction by a logarithmic (in d) factor against the trivial bound O(dt) can be obtained by excluding an odd cycle length ℓ ⩾ 3t if t is odd or by excluding an even cycle length ℓ ⩾ 2t + 2. For edge-colouring and t ⩾ 2, if any two distinct edges connected by a path of fewer than t edges are required to be coloured differently, then excluding an even cycle length ℓ ⩾ 2t is sufficient for a logarithmic factor reduction. For t ⩾ 2, neither of the above statements are possible for other parity combinations of ℓ and t. These results can be considered extensions of results due to Johansson (1996) and Mahdian (2000), and are related to open problems of Alon and Mohar (2002) and Kaiser and Kang (2014).

NP-complete problems should be hard on some instances but those may be extremely rare. On generic instances many such problems, especially related to random graphs, have been proved to be easy. We show the intractability of random instances of a graph colouring problem: this graph problem is hard on average unless all NP problems under all samplable (i.e. generatable in polynomial time) distributions are easy. Worst case reductions use special gadgets and typically map instances into a negligible fraction of possible outputs. Ours must output nearly random graphs and avoid any super-polynomial distortion of probabilities. This poses significant technical difficulties.

We derive an optimal eigenvalue ratio estimate for finite weighted graphs satisfying the curvature-dimension inequality CD(0, ∞). This estimate is independent of the size of the graph and provides a general method to obtain higher-order spectral estimates. The operation of taking Cartesian products is shown to be an efficient way for constructing new weighted graphs satisfying CD(0, ∞). We also discuss a higher-order Cheeger constant-ratio estimate and related topics about expanders.