Combinatorics Seminar

When: Sunday, April 29, 10am
Where: Schreiber 309
Speaker: Michael Krivelevich, Tel Aviv University
Title: The phase transition in random graphs - a simple proof

Abstract:

The classical result of Erdos and Renyi shows that the random graph G(n,p) experiences sharp phase transition around p=1/n - for any \epsilon>0 and p=(1-\epsilon)/n, all connected components of G(n,p) are typically of size O(log n), while for p=(1+\epsilon)/n, with high probability there exists a connected component of size linear in n. We provide a very simple proof of this fundamental result; in fact, we prove that in the supercritical regime p=(1+\epsilon)/n, the random graph G(n,p) contains typically a path of linear length. Time permitting, we also discuss applications of our technique to other random graph models and to positional games.

Joint work with Benny Sudakov (UCLA).