Today the UK funding bodies have published the results of the UK’s most recent national research assessment exercise, the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021.
Research from the Mathematical Institute and the Department of Statistics in Oxford was submitted together under Unit of Assessment 10. Overall, 78% of our submission was judged to be 4* (the highest score available, given for research quality that is world-leading in terms of originality, significance, and rigour).
Resolution of the Erdős-Sauer problem on regular subgraphs
Abstract
In this talk we discuss solution of the well-known problem of Erdős and Sauer from 1975 which asks for the maximum number of edges an $n$-vertex graph can have without containing a $k$-regular subgraph, for some fixed integer $k\geq 3$. We prove that any $n$-vertex graph with average degree at least $C_k\log\log n$ contains a $k$-regular subgraph. This matches the lower bound of Pyber, Rödl and Szemerédi and substantially
improves an old result of Pyber, who showed that average degree at least $C_k\log n$ is enough.
Our method can also be used to settle asymptotically a problem raised by Erdős and Simonovits in 1970 on almost regular subgraphs of sparse graphs and to make progress on the well-known question of Thomassen from 1983 on finding subgraphs with large girth and large average degree.
Joint work with Oliver Janzer