iv Contents

15.5 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 341

16 Mappings 347
16.1 Permutations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347
16.2 Mappings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 350
16.3 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 357
16.4 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 358

17 k-out 361
17.1 Connectivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361
17.2 Perfect Matchings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 364
17.3 Hamilton Cycles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 373
17.4 Nearest Neighbor Graphs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 376
17.5 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 379
17.6 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 380

18 Real World Networks 383

18.1 Preferential Attachment Graph . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 383
18.2 Spatial Preferential Attachment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 391
18.3 Preferential Attachment with Deletion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 397
18.4 Bootstrap Percolation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 405
18.5 A General Model of Web Graphs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 406
18.6 Small World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 415
18.7 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 421
18.8 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 422

19 Weighted Graphs 425

19.1 Minimum Spanning Tree . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 425
19.2 Shortest Paths . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 428
19.3 Minimum Weight Assignment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 432
19.4 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 436
19.5 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 439

IV Further topics 441

20 Resilience 443
20.1 Connectivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 443
20.2 Perfect Matchings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 444
20.3 Hamilton Cycles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 445
20.4 The chromatic number . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 456
20.5 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 457
Contents v

20.6 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 457

21 Extremal Properties 459

21.1 Containers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 459
21.2 Ramsey Properties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 460
21.3 Turán Properties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 462
21.4 Containers and the proof of Theorem 21.1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 464
21.5 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 469
21.6 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 470

22 Thresholds 471
22.1 The Kahn-Kalai conjecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 474
22.2 Proof of the Kahn-Kalai conjecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 475
22.3 Constructing a cover . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 475
22.4 Iteration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 476
22.5 Square of a Hamilton cycle and a little more . . . . . . . . . . . . 479
22.6 Embedding a factor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 481
22.7 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 483
22.8 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 484

23 Contiguity 487
23.1 Small subgraph conditioning for proving contiguity . . . . . . . . 488
23.2 Contiguity of random regular graphs and multigraphs . . . . . . . 493
23.3 Contiguity of superposition models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 497
23.4 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 500
23.5 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 500

24 Random Walk on Random Graphs 503

24.1 Mixing time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 504
24.2 Cover time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 506
24.3 Walker-Deletor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 514
24.4 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 517
24.5 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 517

25 Brief notes on uncovered topics 521

V Tools and Methods 531

26 Moments 533
26.1 First and Second Moment Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 533
26.2 Convergence of Moments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 536
vi Contents

26.3 Stein–Chen Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 540

27 Inequalities 543
27.1 Binomial Coefficient Approximation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 543
27.2 Balls in Boxes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 544
27.3 FKG Inequality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 546
27.4 Sums of Independent Bounded Random Variables . . . . . . . . . 547
27.5 Sampling Without Replacement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 553
27.6 Janson’s Inequality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 554
27.7 Martingales. Azuma-Hoeffding Bounds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 556
27.8 Talagrand’s Inequality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 563
27.9 Dominance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 566

28 Differential Equations Method 569

29 Branching Processes 575

30 Random Walk 577

30.1 Mixing time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 577
30.2 First Visit Time Lemma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 583

31 Entropy 589
31.1 Basic Notions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 589
31.2 Shearer’s Lemma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 592

32 Indices 657
Author Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 658
Main Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 666
Preface

Our purpose in writing this book is to provide a gentle introduction to a subject

that is enjoying a surge in interest. We believe that the subject is fascinating in its
own right, but the increase in interest can be attributed to several factors. One fac-
tor is the realization that networks are “everywhere”. From social networks such
as Facebook, the World Wide Web and the Internet to the complex interactions
between proteins in the cells of our bodies, we face the challenge of understand-
ing their structure and development. By and large natural networks grow in an
unpredictable manner and this is often modeled by a random construction. An-
other factor is the realization by Computer Scientists that NP-hard problems are
often easier to solve than their worst-case suggests and that an analysis of running
times on random instances can be informative.

History
Random graphs were used by Erdős [330] to give a probabilistic construction of
a graph with large girth and large chromatic number. It was only later that Erdős
and Rényi began a systematic study of random graphs as objects of interest in their
own right. Early on they defined the random graph Gn,m and founded the subject.
Often neglected in this story is the contribution of Gilbert [433] who introduced
the model Gn,p , but clearly the credit for getting the subject off the ground goes to
Erdős and Rényi. Their seminal series of papers [331], [333], [334], [335] and in
particular [332], on the evolution of random graphs laid the groundwork for other
mathematicians to become involved in studying properties of random graphs.
In the early eighties the subject was beginning to blossom and it received a
boost from two sources. First was the publication of the landmark book of Béla
Bollobás [155] on random graphs. Around the same time, the Discrete Mathemat-
ics group in Adam Mickiewicz University began a series of conferences in 1983.
This series continues biennially to this day and is now a conference attracting
more and more participants.
The next important event in the subject was the start of the journal Random
Structures and Algorithms in 1990 followed by Combinatorics, Probability and
viii Contents

Computing a few years later. These journals provided a dedicated outlet for work
in the area and are flourishing today.

Scope of the book

We have divided the book into four parts. Part one is devoted to giving a detailed
description of the main properties of Gn,m and Gn,p . The aim is not to give best
possible results, but instead to give some idea of the tools and techniques used in
the subject, as well to display some of the basic results of the area. There is suffi-
cient material in part one for a one semester course at the advanced undergraduate
or beginning graduate level. Once one has finished the content of the first part,
one is equipped to continue with material of the remainder of the book, as well as
to tackle some of the advanced monographs such as Bollobás [155] and the more
recent one by Janson, Łuczak and Ruciński [509].
Each chapter comes with a few exercises. Some are fairly simple and these are
designed to give the reader practice with making some the estimations that are so
prevalent in the subject. In addition each chapter ends with some notes that lead
through references to some of the more advanced important results that have not
been covered.
Part two deals with models of random graphs that naturally extend Gn,m and
Gn,p . Part three deals with other models. Finally, in part four, we describe some
of the main tools used in the area along with proofs of their validity.
Having read this book, the reader should be in a good position to pursue re-
search in the area and we hope that this book will appeal to anyone interested in
Combinatorics or Applied Probability or Theoretical Computer Science.

Acknowledgement
Several people have helped with the writing of this book and we would like to
acknowledge their help. First there are the students who have sat in on courses
based on early versions of this book and who helped to iron out the many typo’s
etc.
We would next like to thank the following people for reading parts of the
book before final submission: Andrew Beveridge, Deepak Bal, Malgosia Bed-
narska, Patrick Bennett, Mindaugas Blozneliz, Antony Bonato, Boris Bukh, Fan
Chung, Amin Coja-Oghlan, Colin Cooper, Andrzej Dudek, Asaf Ferber, Nikolas
Fountoulakis, Catherine Greenhill, Dan Hefetz, Paul Horn, Hsien–Kuei Hwang,
Tal Hershko, Jerzy Jaworski, Tony Johansson, Mihyun Kang, Michael Krivele-
vich, Tomasz Łuczak, Colin McDiarmid, Andrew McDowell, Hosam Mahmoud,
Contents ix

Mike Molloy, Tobias Müller, Rajko Nenadov, Wesley Pegden, Huy Pham, Boris
Pittel, Dan Poole, Pawel Prałat, Oliver Riordan, Andrzej Ruciński, Katarzyna Ry-
barczyk, Wojtek Samotij, Yilun Shang, Matas Šilekis, Greg Sorkin, Joel Spencer,
Sam Spiro, Dudley Stark, Angelika Steger, Prasad Tetali, Andrew Thomason, Lin-
nus Wästlund, Nick Wormald, Stephen Young.
Thanks also to Béla Bollobás for his advice on the structure of the book.

Conventions/Notation
Often in what follows, we will give an expression for a large positive integer. It
might not be obvious that the expression is actually an integer. In which case, the
reader can rest assured that he/she can round up or down and obtained any required
property. We avoid this rounding for convenience and for notational purposes.
In addition we list the following notation:
Mathematical Relations

• f (x) = O(g(x)): | f (x)| ≤ K|g(x)| for some constant K > 0 and all x ∈ R.

• f (x) = Θ(g(x)): f (n) = O(g(x)) and g(x) = O( f (x)).

• f (x) = ω(g(x)) if g(x) = o( f (x)).

• f (x) = Ω(g(x)) if f (x) ≥ cg(x) for some positive constant c.0 and all x ∈ R.

• f (x) = o(g(x)) as x → a: f (x)/g(x) → 0 as x → a.

• A  B: A/B → 0 as n → ∞.

• A  B: A/B → ∞ as n → ∞.

• A ≈ B: A/B → 1 as some parameter converges to 0 or ∞ or another limit.

• A . B or B & A if A ≤ (1 + o(1))B.

• [n]: This is {1, 2, . . . , n}. In general, if a < b are positive integers, then
[a, b] = {a, a + 1, . . . , b}.

• If S is a set and k is a non-negative integer then Sk denotes the set of k-

element subsets of S. In particular, [n]

k dnotes the set of k-sets of {1, 2, . . . , n}.
S
Sk S

Furthermore, ≤k = j=0 j .

Graph Notation