A Variation of the Erdős-Sós Conjecture in Bipartite Graphs

Abstract

The Erdős-Sós Conjecture states that every graph with average degree more than $k-2$ contains all trees of order $k$ as subgraphs. In this paper, we consider a variation of the above conjecture: studying the maximum size of an $(n,m)$-bipartite graph which does not contain all $(k,l)$-bipartite trees for given integers $n\ge m$ and $k\ge l$. In particular, we determine that the maximum size of an $(n,m)$-bipartite graph which does not contain all $(n,m)$-bipartite trees as subgraphs (or all $(k,2)$-bipartite trees as subgraphs, respectively). Furthermore, all these extremal graphs are characterized.

22 pages 2figures