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1. On 2-fold graceful graphs

   Bunge, R; Cornett, M; El-Zanati, S; Jeffries, J; Rattin, E. (January 2020, Journal of Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial Computing)

   null (Ed.)

   A long-standing conjecture by Kotzig, Ringel, and Rosa states that every tree admits a graceful labeling. That is, for any tree $$T$$ with $$n$$~edges, it is conjectured that there exists a labeling $$f\colon V(T) \to \{0,1,\ldots,n\}$$ such that the set of induced edge labels $$\bigl\{ |f(u)-f(v)| : \{u,v\}\in E(T) \bigr\}$$ is exactly $$\{1,2,\ldots,n\}$$. We extend this concept to allow for multigraphs with edge multiplicity at most~$$2$$. A \emph{2-fold graceful labeling} of a graph (or multigraph) $$G$$ with $$n$$~edges is a one-to-one function $$f\colon V(G) \to \{0,1,\ldots,n\}$$ such that the multiset of induced edge labels is comprised of two copies of each element in $$\bigl\{ 1,2,\ldots, \lfloor n/2 \rfloor \bigr\}$$ and, if $$n$$ is odd, one copy of $$\bigl\{ \lceil n/2 \rceil \bigr\}$$. When $$n$$ is even, this concept is similar to that of 2-equitable labelings which were introduced by Bloom and have been studied for several classes of graphs. We show that caterpillars, cycles of length $$n \not\equiv 1 \pmod{4}$$, and complete bipartite graphs admit 2-fold graceful labelings. We also show that under certain conditions, the join of a tree and an empty graph (i.e., a graph with vertices but no edges) is $$2$$-fold graceful. 

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2. Universal Geometric Graphs

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60440-0_14  

   Frati, Fabrizio; Hoffmann, Michael; Toth, Csaba D. (October 2020, Graph-Theoretic Concepts in Computer Science (WG 2020))

   null (Ed.)

   We introduce and study the problem of constructing geometric graphs that have few vertices and edges and that are universal for planar graphs or for some sub-class of planar graphs; a geometric graph is universal for a class H of planar graphs if it contains an embedding, i.e., a crossing-free drawing, of every graph in H . Our main result is that there exists a geometric graph with n vertices and O(nlogn) edges that is universal for n-vertex forests; this extends to the geometric setting a well-known graph-theoretic result by Chung and Graham, which states that there exists an n-vertex graph with O(nlogn) edges that contains every n-vertex forest as a subgraph. Our O(nlogn) bound on the number of edges is asymptotically optimal. We also prove that, for every h>0 , every n-vertex convex geometric graph that is universal for the class of the n-vertex outerplanar graphs has Ωh(n2−1/h) edges; this almost matches the trivial O(n2) upper bound given by the n-vertex complete convex geometric graph. Finally, we prove that there is an n-vertex convex geometric graph with n vertices and O(nlogn) edges that is universal for n-vertex caterpillars. 

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3. Irregular subgraphs

   https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963548322000220  

   Alon, Noga; Wei, Fan (March 2023, Combinatorics, Probability and Computing)

   Abstract We suggest two related conjectures dealing with the existence of spanning irregular subgraphs of graphs. The first asserts that any $$d$$ -regular graph on $$n$$ vertices contains a spanning subgraph in which the number of vertices of each degree between $$0$$ and $$d$$ deviates from $$\frac{n}{d+1}$$ by at most $$2$$ . The second is that every graph on $$n$$ vertices with minimum degree $$\delta$$ contains a spanning subgraph in which the number of vertices of each degree does not exceed $$\frac{n}{\delta +1}+2$$ . Both conjectures remain open, but we prove several asymptotic relaxations for graphs with a large number of vertices $$n$$ . In particular we show that if $$d^3 \log n \leq o(n)$$ then every $$d$$ -regular graph with $$n$$ vertices contains a spanning subgraph in which the number of vertices of each degree between $$0$$ and $$d$$ is $$(1+o(1))\frac{n}{d+1}$$ . We also prove that any graph with $$n$$ vertices and minimum degree $$\delta$$ contains a spanning subgraph in which no degree is repeated more than $$(1+o(1))\frac{n}{\delta +1}+2$$ times. 

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4. On the Maximum Spread of Planar and Outerplanar Graphs

   https://doi.org/10.37236/11844  

   Li, Zelong; Linz, William; Lu, Linyuan; Wang, Zhiyu (July 2024, The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics)

   The spread of a graph $$G$$ is the difference between the largest and smallest eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix of $$G$$. Gotshall, O'Brien and Tait conjectured that for sufficiently large $$n$$, the $$n$$-vertex outerplanar graph with maximum spread is the graph obtained by joining a vertex to a path on $n-1$ vertices. In this paper, we disprove this conjecture by showing that the extremal graph is the graph obtained by joining a vertex to a path on $$\lceil(2n-1)/3\rceil$$ vertices and $$\lfloor(n-2)/3\rfloor$$ isolated vertices. For planar graphs, we show that the extremal $$n$$-vertex planar graph attaining the maximum spread is the graph obtained by joining two nonadjacent vertices to a path on $$\lceil(2n-2)/3\rceil$$ vertices and $$\lfloor(n-4)/3\rfloor$$ isolated vertices. 

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5. The Implicit Graph Conjecture is False

   https://doi.org/10.1109/FOCS54457.2022.00109  

   Hatami, Hamed; Hatami, Pooya (October 2022, Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science)

   An efficient implicit representation of an n-vertex graph G in a family F of graphs assigns to each vertex of G a binary code of length O(log n) so that the adjacency between every pair of vertices can be determined only as a function of their codes. This function can depend on the family but not on the individual graph. Every family of graphs admitting such a representation contains at most 2^O(n log(n)) graphs on n vertices, and thus has at most factorial speed of growth. The Implicit Graph Conjecture states that, conversely, every hereditary graph family with at most factorial speed of growth admits an efficient implicit representation. We refute this conjecture by establishing the existence of hereditary graph families with factorial speed of growth that require codes of length n^Ω(1). 

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