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The `odd cover number' of a complete graph is the smallest size of a family of complete bipartite graphs that covers each edge an odd number of times. For $n$ odd, Buchanan, Clifton, Culver, Nie, O'Neill, Rombach and Yin showed that the odd cover number of $K_n$ is equal to $(n+1)/2$ or $(n+3)/2$, and they conjectured that it is always $(n+1)/2$. We prove this conjecture. For $n$ even, Babai and Frankl showed that the odd cover number of $K_n$ is always at least $n/2$, and the above authors and Radhakrishnan, Sen and Vishwanathan gave some values of $n$ for which equality holds. We give some new examples. Our constructions arise from some very symmetric constructions for the corresponding problem for complete hypergraphs. Thus the odd cover number of the complete 3-graph $K_n^{(3)}$ is the smallest number of complete 3-partite 3-graphs such that each 3-set is in an odd number of them. We show that the odd cover number of $K_n^{(3)}$ is exactly $n/2$ for even $n$, and we show that for odd $n$ it is $(n-1)/2$ for infinitely many values of $n$. We also show that for $r=3$ and $r=4$ the odd cover number of $K_n^{(r)}$ is strictly less than the partition number, answering a question of Buchanan, Clifton, Culver, Nie, O'Neill, Rombach and Yin for those values of $r$., Comment: 7 pages

Fern\'andez-Bret\'on, Sarmiento and Vera showed that whenever a direct sum of sufficiently many copies of ${\mathbb Z}_4$, the cyclic group of order 4, is countably coloured there are arbitrarily large finite sets $X$ whose sumsets $X+X$ are monochromatic. They asked if the elements of order 4 are necessary, in the following strong sense: if $G$ is an abelian group having no elements of order 4, is it always the case there there is a countable colouring of $G$ for which there is not even a monochromatic sumset $X+X$ with $X$ of size 2? Our aim in this short note is to show that this is indeed the case.

A set $X$ is called Euclidean Ramsey if, for any $k$ and sufficiently large $n$, every $k$-colouring of $\mathbb{R}^n$ contains a monochromatic congruent copy of $X$. This notion was introduced by Erd\H{o}s, Graham, Montgomery, Rothschild, Spencer and Straus. They asked if a set is Ramsey if and only if it is spherical, meaning that it lies on the surface of a sphere. It is not too difficult to show that if a set is not spherical then it is not Euclidean Ramsey either, but the converse is very much open despite extensive research over the years. On the other hand, the block sets conjecture is a purely combinatorial, Hales-Jewett type of statement, concerning `blocks in large products', introduced by Leader, Russell and Walters. If true, the block sets conjecture would imply that every transitive set (a set whose symmetry group acts transitively) is Euclidean Ramsey. As for the question above, the block sets conjecture remains very elusive, being known only in a few cases. In this paper we show that the sizes of the blocks in the block sets conjecture cannot be bounded, even for templates over the alphabet of size $3$. We also show that for the first non-trivial template, namely $123$, the blocks may be taken to be of size $2$ (for any number of colours). This is best possible; all previous bounds were `tower-type' large., Comment: 10 pages

A subgraph of the $n$-dimensional hypercube is called 'layered' if it is a subgraph of a layer of some hypercube. In this paper we show that there exist subgraphs of the cube of arbitrarily large girth that are not layered. This answers a question of Axenovich, Martin and Winter. Perhaps surprisingly, these subgraphs may even be taken to be induced., Comment: 11 pages

An $r$-daisy is an $r$-uniform hypergraph consisting of the six $r$-sets formed by taking the union of an $(r-2)$-set with each of the 2-sets of a disjoint 4-set. Bollob\'as, Leader and Malvenuto, and also Bukh, conjectured that the Tur\'an density of the $r$-daisy tends to zero as $r \to \infty$. In this paper we disprove this conjecture. Adapting our construction, we are also able to disprove a folklore conjecture about Tur\'an densities of hypercubes. For fixed $d$ and large $n$, we show that the smallest set of vertices of the $n$-dimensional hypercube $Q_n$ that meets every copy of $Q_d$ has asymptotic density strictly below $1/(d+1)$, for all $d \geq 8$. In fact, we show that this asymptotic density is at most $c^d$, for some constant $c<1$. As a consequence, we obtain similar bounds for the edge-Tur\'an densities of hypercubes. We also answer some related questions of Johnson and Talbot, and disprove a conjecture made by Bukh and by Griggs and Lu on poset densities., Comment: 14 pages. Minor corrections made since last version

How many graphs on an $n$-point set can we find such that any two have connected intersection? Berger, Berkowitz, Devlin, Doppelt, Durham, Murthy and Vemuri showed that the maximum is exactly $1/2^{n-1}$ of all graphs. Our aim in this short note is to give a 'directed' version of this result; we show that a family of oriented graphs such that any two have strongly-connected intersection has size at most $1/3^n$ of all oriented graphs. We also show that a family of graphs such that any two have Hamiltonian intersection has size at most $1/2^n$ of all graphs, verifying a conjecture of the above authors., Comment: 5 pages

Suppose that $A$ and $B$ are sets in $\mathbb{R}^d$, and we form the sumset of $A$ with $n$ random points of $B$. Given the volumes of $A$ and $B$, how should we choose them to minimize the expected volume of this sumset? Our aim in this paper is to show that we should take $A$ and $B$ to be Euclidean balls. We also consider the analogous question in the torus $\mathbb{T}^d$, and we show that in this case the optimal choices of $A$ and $B$ are bands, in other words, sets of the form $[x,y]\times\mathbb{T}^{d-1}$. We also give stability versions of our results.

What is the smallest number of random transpositions (meaning that we swap given pairs of elements with given probabilities) that we can make on an $n$-point set to ensure that each element is uniformly distributed -- in the sense that the probability that $i$ is mapped to $j$ is $1/n$ for all $i$ and $j$? And what if we insist that each pair is uniformly distributed? In this paper we show that the minimum for the first problem is about $\frac{1}{2} n \log_2 n$, with this being exact when $n$ is a power of $2$. For the second problem, we show that, rather surprisingly, the answer is not quadratic: $O(n \log^2 n)$ random transpositions suffice. We also show that if we ask only that the pair $1,2$ is uniformly distributed then the answer is $2n-3$. This proves a conjecture of Groenland, Johnston, Radcliffe and Scott., Comment: 15 pages

Our aim in this paper is to show that, for any $k$, there is a finite colouring of the set of rationals whose denominators contain only the first $k$ primes such that no infinite set has all of its finite sums and products monochromatic. We actually prove a `uniform' form of this: there is a finite colouring of the rationals with the property that no infinite set whose denominators contain only finitely many primes has all of its finite sums and products monochromatic. We also give various other results, including a new short proof of the old result that there is a finite colouring of the naturals such that no infinite set has all of its pairwise sums and products monochromatic., Comment: 17 pages

The classical Cauchy--Davenport inequality gives a lower bound for the size of the sum of two subsets of ${\mathbb Z}_p$, where $p$ is a prime. Our main aim in this paper is to prove a considerable strengthening of this inequality, where we take only a small number of points from each of the two subsets when forming the sum. One of our results is that there is an absolute constant $c>0$ such that if $A$ and $B$ are subsets of ${\mathbb Z}_p$ with $|A|=|B|=n\le p/3$ then there are subsets $A'\subset A$ and $B'\subset B$ with $|A'|=|B'|\le c \sqrt{n}$ such that $|A'+B'|\ge 2n-1$. In fact, we show that one may take any sizes one likes: as long as $c_1$ and $c_2$ satisfy $c_1c_2 \ge cn$ then we may choose $|A'|=c_1$ and $|B'|=c_2$. We prove related results for general abelian groups.

In its usual form, Freiman's 3k-4 theorem states that if A and B are subsets of the integers of size k with small sumset (of size close to 2k) then they are very close to arithmetic progressions. Our aim in this paper is to strengthen this by allowing only a bounded number of possible summands from one of the sets. We show that if A and B are subsets of the integers of size k such that for any four-element subset X of B the sumset A+X has size not much more than 2k then already this implies that A and B are very close to arithmetic progressions.

In this paper we start to investigate a new body of questions in additive combinatorics. The fundamental Cauchy--Davenport theorem gives a lower bound on the size of a sumset A+B for subsets of the cyclic group Zp of order p (p prime), and this is just one example of a large family of results. Our aim in this paper is to investigate what happens if we restrict the number of elements of one set that we may use to form the sums. Here is the question we set out to answer: given two subsets, A and B, does B have a subset C of bounded size such that A+C is large, perhaps even comparable to the size of A+B? In particular, can we get close to the lower bound of the Cauchy--Davenport theorem? Our main results show that, rather surprisingly, in many circumstances it is possible to obtain not merely an asymptotic version of the usual sumset bound, but even the exact bound itself., Comment: Revised version

A (finite or infinite) graph is called constructible if it may be obtained recursively from the one-point graph by repeatedly adding dominated vertices. In the finite case, the constructible graphs are precisely the cop-win graphs, but for infinite graphs the situation is not well understood. One of our aims in this paper is to give a graph that is cop-win but not constructible. This is the first known such example. We also show that every countable ordinal arises as the rank of some constructible graph, answering a question of Evron, Solomon and Stahl. In addition, we give a finite constructible graph for which there is no construction order whose associated domination map is a homomorphism, answering a question of Chastand, Laviolette and Polat. Lehner showed that every constructible graph is a weak cop win (meaning that the cop can eventually force the robber out of any finite set). Our other main aim is to investigate how this notion relates to the notion of `locally constructible' (every finite graph is contained in a finite constructible subgraph). We show that, under mild extra conditions, every locally constructible graph is a weak cop win. But we also give an example to show that, in general, a locally constructible graph need not be a weak cop win. Surprisingly, this graph may even be chosen to be locally finite. We also give some open problems., Comment: 20 pages, 5 figures

Our aim in this note is to show that, for any $\epsilon>0$, there exists a union-closed family $\mathcal F$ with (unique) smallest set $S$ such that no element of $S$ belongs to more than a fraction $\epsilon$ of the sets in $\mathcal F$. More precisely, we give an example of a union-closed family with smallest set of size $k$ such that no element of this set belongs to more than a fraction $(1+o(1))\frac{\log_2 k}{2k}$ of the sets in $\mathcal F$. We also give explicit examples of union-closed families containing `small' sets for which we have been unable to verify the Union-Closed Conjecture., Comment: 5 pages