Introduction to graphs

We take a whirlwind tour of problems and techniques at the boundary of computer science and statistical physics. We start with a brief description of P, NP, and NP-completeness. We then discuss random graphs, including the emergence of the giant component and the k-core, using techniques from branching processes and differential equations. Using these tools as well as the second moment method, we give upper and lower bounds on the critical clause density for random k-SAT. We ...

Graphs are fundamental objects that find widespread applications across computer science and beyond. Graph Theory has yielded deep insights about structural properties of various families of graphs, which are leveraged in the design and analysis of algorithms for graph optimization problems and other computational optimization problems. These insights have also proved helpful in understanding the limits of efficient computation by providing constructions of hard problem insta...

Typical-case computation complexity is a research topic at the boundary of computer science, applied mathematics, and statistical physics. In the last twenty years the replica-symmetry-breaking mean field theory of spin glasses and the associated message-passing algorithms have greatly deepened our understanding of typical-case computation complexity. In this paper we use the vertex cover problem, a basic nondeterministic-polynomial (NP)-complete combinatorial optimization pr...

These are the proceedings of the Second Workshop on GRAPH Inspection and Traversal Engineering (GRAPHITE 2013), which took place on March 24, 2013 in Rome, Italy, as a satellite event of the 16th European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software (ETAPS 2013). The topic of the GRAPHITE workshop is graph analysis in all its forms in computer science. Graphs are used to represent data in many application areas, and they are subjected to various computational algori...

Graph algorithms play an important role in many computer science areas. In order to solve problems that can be modeled using graphs, it is necessary to use a data structure that can represent those graphs in an efficient manner. On top of this, an infrastructure should be build that will assist in implementing common algorithms or developing specialized ones. Here, a new Java library is introduced, called Graph4J, that uses a different approach when compared to existing, well...

We present a prototype of a software tool for exploration of multiple combinatorial optimisation problems in large real-world and synthetic complex networks. Our tool, called GraphCombEx (an acronym of Graph Combinatorial Explorer), provides a unified framework for scalable computation and presentation of high-quality suboptimal solutions and bounds for a number of widely studied combinatorial optimisation problems. Efficient representation and applicability to large-scale gr...

We study directed random graphs (random graphs whose edges are directed), and present new results on the so-called strong components of those graphs. We provide analytic and simulation results on two special classes of strong component, called cycle components and knots, which are important in random networks that represent certain computational systems.

In recent years there has been much progress in graph theory on questions of the following type. What is the threshold for a certain large substructure to appear in a random graph? When does a random graph contain all structures from a given family? And when does it contain them so robustly that even an adversary who is allowed to perturb the graph cannot destroy all of them? I will survey this progress, and highlight the vital role played by some newly developed methods, suc...

Graph theory has become a very critical component in many applications in the computing field including networking and security. Unfortunately, it is also amongst the most complex topics to understand and apply. In this paper, we review some of the key applications of graph theory in network security. We first cover some algorithmic aspects, then present network coding and its relation to routing.

We present and discuss seven different open problems in applied combinatorics. The application areas relevant to this compilation include quantum computing, algorithmic differentiation, topological data analysis, iterative methods, hypergraph cut algorithms, and power systems.