Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Identifier

276

Date

2011

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Mathematical Sciences

Concentration

Mathematics

Committee Chair

Bela Bollobas

Committee Member

Paul Neville Balister

Committee Member

Jeno Lehel

Committee Member

Vladimir S Nikiforov

Abstract

This dissertation concerns two sets of problems in extremal combinatorics. The major part, Chapters 1 to 4, is about Ramsey-type problems for cycles. The shorter second part, Chapter 5, is about a problem in bootstrap percolation. Next, we describe each topic more precisely. Given three graphs G, L1 and L2, we say that G arrows (L1, L2) and write G → (L1, L2), if for every edge-coloring of G by two colors, say 1 and 2, there exists a color i whose color class contains Li as a subgraph. The classical problem in Ramsey theory is the case where G, L1 and L2 are complete graphs; in this case the question is how large the order of G must be (in terms of the orders of L1 andL2) to guarantee that G → (L1, L2). Recently there has been much interest in the case where L1 and L2 are cycles and G is a graph whose minimum degree is large. In the past decade, numerous results have been proved about those problems. We will continue this work and prove two conjectures that have been left open. Our main weapon is Szemeredi's Regularity Lemma.Our second topic is about a rather unusual aspect of the fast expanding theory of bootstrap percolation. Bootstrap percolation on a graph G with parameter r is a cellular automaton modeling the spread of an infection: starting with a set A0, cointained in V(G), of initially infected vertices, define a nested sequence of sets, A0 ⊆ A1 ⊆. . . ⊆ V(G), by the update rule that At+1, the set of vertices infected at time t + 1, is obtained from At by adding to it all vertices with at least r neighbors in At. The initial set A0 percolates if At = V(G) for some t. The minimal such t is the time it takes for A0 to percolate. We prove results about the maximum percolation time on the two-dimensional grid with parameter r = 2.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to the local University of Memphis Electronic Theses & dissertation (ETD) Repository.

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