Richard P. Stanley Seminar in Combinatorics: Spanning trees in pseudorandom graphs via sorting networks
SEMINARS: HARVARD-MIT COMBINATORICS
When: December 4, 2025
4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Where: MIT 2-139
Speaker: Natasha Morrison (University of Victoria, Canada)
We show that \((n,d,\lambda)\)-graphs with \(\lambda=O(d/log^3n)\) are universal with respect to all bounded degree spanning trees. This significantly improves upon the previous best bound due to Han and Yang, and makes progress towards a problem of Alon, Krivelevich, and Sudakov from 2007. The key new idea in our proof relies on the existence of sorting networks of logarithmic depth, as given by a celebrated construction of Ajtai, Koml\'{o}s and Szemer\'{e}di.
Joint work with Joseph Hyde, Alp M\”{u}yesser, and Matías Pavez-Signé.
For information about the Richard P. Stanley Seminar in Combinatorics, visit… https://math.mit.edu/combin/
