Combinatorics Seminar

When: Sunday, April 15, 10am
Where: Schreiber 309
Speaker: Asaf Shapira, Tel Aviv University
Title: A Wowzer Type Lower Bound for the Strong Regularity Lemma

Abstract:

The regularity lemma of Szemeredi asserts that one can partition every graph into a bounded number of quasi-random bipartite graphs. In some applications however, one would like to have a strong control on how quasi-random these bipartite graphs are. Alon, Fischer, Krivelevich and Szegedy obtained a variant of the regularity lemma, which allows one to have an arbitrary control on this measure of quasi-randomness. However, their proof only guaranteed to produce a partition where the number of parts is given by the Wowzer function, which is the iterated version of the Tower function. We show here that a bound of this type is unavoidable by constructing a graph H, with the property that even if one wants a very mild control on the quasi-randomness of a regular partition, then any such partition of H must have a number of parts given by a Wowzer-type function.

Joint work with S. Kalyanasundaram.