Tur\'an numbers for disjoint paths

TL;DR

This paper determines the Turán numbers for disjoint paths for all sufficiently large n, extends previous results, confirms a conjecture for multiple paths, and explores extremal graph families related to classical problems.

Contribution

It provides a complete determination of Turán numbers for disjoint paths for all n with minor conditions, extending prior partial results and confirming a conjecture.

Findings

Exact Turán numbers for all n with minor conditions

Confirmation of the Bushaw-Kettle conjecture for multiple paths

Existence of different extremal graphs with identical Turán numbers

Abstract

The Tur\'{a}n number of a graph $H$, $ex(n,H)$, is the maximum number of edges in any graph of order $n$ which does not contain $H$ as a subgraph. Lidick\'{y}, Liu and Palmer determined $ex(n, F_m)$ for $n$ sufficiently large and proved that the extremal graph is unique, where $F_m$ is disjoint paths of $P_{k_1}, \ldots, P_{k_m}$ [Lidick\'{y},B., Liu,H. and Palmer,C. (2013). On the Tur\'{a}n number of forests. Electron. J. Combin. 20(2) Paper 62, 13 pp]. In this paper, by mean of a different approach, we determine $ex(n, F_m)$ for all integers $n$ with minor conditions, which extends their partial results. Furthermore, we partly confirm the conjecture proposed by Bushaw and Kettle for $ex(n, k\cdot P_l)$ [Bushaw,N. and Kttle,N. (2011) Tur\'{a}n numbers of multiple paths and equibipartite forests. Combin. Probab. Comput. 20 837-853]. Moreover, we show that there exist two family graphs $F_m$ and $F_m^{\prime}$ such that $ex(n, F_m)=ex(n, F_m^{\prime})$ for all integers $n$, which is related to an old problem of Erd\H{o}s and Simonovits.