On February 17, 2021, David Wood from Monash University gave an online talk at the Virtual Discrete Math Colloquium on the maximum number of copies of a fixed forest in various sparse graph classes. The title of his talk was “Tree densities of sparse graph classes“.
David Wood, Tree densities of sparse graph classes
This talk considers the following question at the intersection of extremal and structural graph theory: What is the maximum number of copies of a fixed forest $T$ in an $n$-vertex graph in a graph class $\mathcal{G}$ as $n\to \infty$? I will answer this question for a variety of sparse graph classes $\mathcal{G}$. In particular, we show that the answer is $\Theta(n^{\alpha_d(T)})$ where $\alpha_d(T)$ is the size of the largest stable set in the subforest of $T$ induced by the vertices of degree at most $d$, for some integer $d$ that depends on $\mathcal{G}$. For example, when $\mathcal{G}$ is the class of $k$-degenerate graphs then $d=k$; when $\mathcal{G}$ is the class of graphs containing no $K_{s,t}$-minor ($t\geq s$) then $d=s-1$; and when $\mathcal{G}$ is the class of $k$-planar graphs then $d=2$. All these results are in fact consequences of a single lemma in terms of a finite set of excluded subgraphs. This is joint work with Tony Huynh (arXiv:2009.12989).