On September 6, 2024, Neal Bushaw from Virginia Commonwealth University gave a talk at the Discrete Math Seminar on the rainbow version of the saturation problem. The title of his talk was “Edge-colored Extremal Problems“.
An edge-colored graph $H$ is called rainbow if all of its edges are given distinct colors. An edge-colored graph $G$ is then called rainbow $H$-free when no copy of $H$ in $G$ is rainbow. With this, we define a graph $G$ to be rainbow $H$-saturated when there is some proper edge-coloring of $G$ which is rainbow $H$-free, but for every pair of non-adjacent vertices $x,y\in V(G)$, the graph $G+xy$ formed by adding the edge $xy$ to $G$ cannot be given a rainbow $H$-free coloring. We think of these graphs as edge-maximal rainbow $H$-free graphs. (We note that here we make no restrictions on the colorings of $G+xy$ whatsoever, except that they are proper colorings. They may use any number of colors, and need not be extensions of the original rainbow $H$-free coloring of $G$.)
With this framework in place, we define the rainbow saturation number and rainbow extremal number to be the largest and smallest number of edges, respectively, among all $n$ vertex rainbow $H$-saturated graphs. The latter of these was defined by Keevash, Mubayi, Sudakov, and Verstraëte in 2007; the former was introduced by B., Johnston, and Rombach in 2019.
In this talk, we discuss recent progress on both the rainbow saturation numbers and rainbow extremal numbers. We also give several broad generalizations of these concepts and discuss many open problems. This talk contains joint work with Vic Bednar (Furman), Dan Johnston (Trinity College, CT), and Puck Rombach (Vermont).
