Combinatorics Seminar

When: Sunday, December 27, 10am
Where: Schreiber 309
Speaker: Eyal Lubetzky, Microsoft Research
Title: Distances in random metrics: from weighted expanders to the geometry of the random graph

Abstract:

How does the metric induced by an expander graph change when random weights are placed on its edges? In particular, how are typical and maximal distances affected by this perturbation? A recent structure result for the largest component in the supercritical Erdos-Renyi random graph translates the study of its geometry to these questions, where the role of the expander is played by a random cubic graph. This enables us to read off key properties of the supercritical random graph such as the diameter (whose asymptotics for the full supercritical regime were unknown prior to this work), bounds on longest simple paths and cycles etc. Prior estimates for these include works by Luczak, Chung and Lu, Fernholz and Ramachandran, Luczak and Seierstad and Riordan and Wormald.

In the talk we will describe the reduction from the supercritical random graph to the random perturbation of a random cubic graph. We will then demonstrate how to characterize the geometry of the giant component via this reduction, focusing on typical distances between vertices and the asymptotics of the diameter.

Based on joint works with Jian Ding, Jeong Han Kim and Yuval Peres.