For a finite group $G$ denote by $N\left(G\right)$ the set of conjugacy class sizes of $G$. In 1980s, J. G. Thompson posed the following conjecture: If $L$ is a finite nonabelian simple group, $G$ is a finite group with trivial center and $N\left(G\right)=N\left(L\right)$, then $G\cong L$. We prove this conjecture for an infinite class of simple groups. Let $p$ be an odd prime. We show that every finite group $G$ with the property $Z\left(G\right)=1$ and $N\left(G\right)=N\left(A_i\right)$ is necessarily isomorphic to $A_i$, where $i\in \{2p,2p+1\}$.

A graph $G$ is $H$-saturated if it contains no $H$ as a subgraph, but does contain $H$ after the addition of any edge in the complement of $G$. The saturation number, $\mathrm{sat}(n,H)$, is the minimum number of edges of a graph in the set of all $H$-saturated graphs of order $n$. We determine the saturation number $\mathrm{sat}(n,P_6+t{P}_2)$ for $n\ge \frac{10}{3}t+10$ and characterize the extremal graphs for $n>\frac{10}{3}t+20$.

Given a graph $G$, let $f\left(G\right)$ denote the maximum number of edges in a bipartite subgraph of $G$. Given a fixed graph $H$ and a positive integer $m$, let $f(m,H)$ denote the minimum possible cardinality of $f\left(G\right)$, as $G$ ranges over all graphs on $m$ edges that contain no copy of $H$. In this paper we prove that $f(m,{\theta }_{k,s})\ge \frac{1}{2}m+\Omega \left(m^{(2k+1)/(2k+2)}\right)$, which extends the results of N. Alon, M. Krivelevich, B. Sudakov. Write $K_k^{\text{'}}$ and $K_{t,s}^{\text{'}}$ for the subdivisions of $K_k$ and $K_{t,s}$. We show that $f(m,K_k^{\text{'}})\ge \frac{1}{2}m+\Omega \left(m^{(5k-8)/(6k-10)}\right)$ and $f(m,K_{t,s}^{\text{'}})\ge \frac{1}{2}m+\Omega \left(m^{(5t-1)/(6t-2)}\right)$, improving a result of Q. Zeng, J. Hou. We also give lower bounds on...

For a simple graph $G$ on $n$ vertices and an integer $k$ with $1\le k\le n$, denote by ${𝒮}_k^{+}\left(G\right)$ the sum of $k$ largest signless Laplacian eigenvalues of $G$. It was conjectured that ${𝒮}_k^{+}\left(G\right)\le e\left(G\right)+\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{k+1}{2}\right)$, where $e\left(G\right)$ is the number of edges of $G$. This conjecture has been proved to be true for all graphs when $k\in \{1,2,n-1,n\}$, and for trees, unicyclic graphs, bicyclic graphs and regular graphs (for all $k$). In this note, this conjecture is proved to be true for all graphs when $k=n-2$, and for some new classes of graphs.

We introduce the notion of a coherent $P$-ultrafilter on a complete ccc Boolean algebra, strengthening the notion of a $P$-point on $\omega$, and show that these ultrafilters exist generically under $𝔠=𝔡$. This improves the known existence result of Ketonen [On the existence of $P$-points in the Stone-Čech compactification of integers, Fund. Math. 92 (1976), 91–94]. Similarly, the existence theorem of Canjar [On the generic existence of special ultrafilters, Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 110 (1990), no. 1,...

The generalized $k$-connectivity ${\kappa }_k\left(G\right)$ of a graph $G$ was introduced by Chartrand et al. in 1984. As a natural counterpart of this concept, Li et al. in 2011 introduced the concept of generalized $k$-edge-connectivity which is defined as ${\lambda }_k\left(G\right)=min\{\lambda \left(S\right):S\subseteq V\left(G\right)$ and $\left|S\right|=k\}$, where $\lambda \left(S\right)$ denotes the maximum number $\ell$ of pairwise edge-disjoint trees $T_1,T_2,...,T_{\ell }$ in $G$ such that $S\subseteq V\left(T_i\right)$ for $1\le i\le \ell$. In this paper we prove that for any two connected graphs $G$ and $H$ we have ${\lambda }_3(G\square H)\ge {\lambda }_3\left(G\right)+{\lambda }_3\left(H\right)$, where $G\square H$ is the Cartesian product of $G$ and $H$. Moreover, the bound is sharp. We also...

Let $G$ be a finite group and let $N\left(G\right)$ denote the set of conjugacy class sizes of $G$. Thompson’s conjecture states that if $G$ is a centerless group and $S$ is a non-abelian simple group satisfying $N\left(G\right)=N\left(S\right)$, then $G\cong S$. In this paper, we investigate a variation of this conjecture for some symmetric groups under a weaker assumption. In particular, it is shown that $G\cong \mathrm{Sym}(p+1)$ if and only if $\left|G\right|=(p+1)!$ and $G$ has a special conjugacy class of size $(p+1)!/p$, where $p>5$ is a prime number. Consequently, if $G$ is a centerless group with $N\left(G\right)=N\left(\mathrm{Sym}\right(p+1\left)\right)$, then...

Suppose that $A$ is a real symmetric matrix of order $n$. Denote by $m_A\left(0\right)$ the nullity of $A$. For a nonempty subset $\alpha$ of $\{1,2,...,n\}$, let $A\left(\alpha \right)$ be the principal submatrix of $A$ obtained from $A$ by deleting the rows and columns indexed by $\alpha$. When $m_{A\left(\alpha \right)}\left(0\right)=m_A\left(0\right)+\left|\alpha \right|$, we call $\alpha$ a P-set of $A$. It is known that every P-set of $A$ contains at most $\lfloor n/2\rfloor$ elements. The graphs of even order for which one can find a matrix attaining this bound are now completely characterized. However, the odd case turned out to be more difficult to tackle. As...

We give a graph theoretic interpretation of $r$-Lah numbers, namely, we show that the $r$-Lah number ${⌊\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{n}{k}⌋}_r$ counting the number of $r$-partitions of an $(n+r)$-element set into $k+r$ ordered blocks is just equal to the number of matchings consisting of $n-k$ edges in the complete bipartite graph with partite sets of cardinality $n$ and $n+2r-1$ ($0\le k\le n$, $r\ge 1$). We present five independent proofs including a direct, bijective one. Finally, we close our work with a similar result for $r$-Stirling numbers of the second kind. ...