1. Introduction
In this paper, the graphs are all undirected simple graphs. Let G and H be two graphs. We say that a graph G is H-free if G does not contain a subgraph isomorphic to H. In 1941, Turán proved that the extremal graph which does not contain
as a subgraph is the Turán graph
, where Turán graph
is the
complete r-partite graph on n vertices with each part containing
or
vertices. Turán’s theorem [1] is a fundamental theorem in graph theory, which is the beginning of extremal graph theory. For a simple graph H, the Turán number of H, denoted by
, is the maximum number of edges among H-free graphs with n vertices, i.e.,
.
Turán’s theorem states that
. Erdős, Stone and Simonovits [2] [3] generalized this result by using the chromatic number of graph.
The Erdős-Stone-Simonovits theorem states that, for any given graph H and any fixed
, there exists a positive integer
such that, for any
,
,
where
is the chromatic number of H. The theorem means that it is asymptotically best possible for any graph H with
.
When the forbidden subgraph H is a bipartite graph, there are lots of interesting results. In 1954, Kővári, Sós and Turán [4] showed that, for
,
. Call a graph H r-degenerate if each subgraph of H has a vertex of degree at most r. Note that
is an r-degenerate bipartite graph and
. Motivated by the Kővári-Sós-Turán theorem, the following conjecture was proposed by Erdős in 1966.
Conjecture 1. [5] If H is an r-degenerate bipartite graph, then
.
This conjecture is widely open. Alon, Rónyai and Szabó [6], Kollár, Rónyai and Szabó [7], respectively, showed that the upper bound of this conjecture is in fact sharp for r-degenerate bipartite graph. They proved that there exists a positive
constant
depending on r such that
for
and
. The following result due to Füredi [8] confirmed the conjecture in
part in 1991. Later, Alon, Krivelevich and Sudakov [9] gave a new proof for this result in 2003.
Theorem 2. [8] [9] If H is a bipartite graph with maximum degree at most r on one part, then there exists a constant c depending only on H such that
.
In [9], Alon, Krivelevich and Sudakov showed a weaker bound for Conjecture 1.
Theorem 3. [9] If H is an r-degenerate bipartite graph, then
.
As a generalization of the Turán number, the bipartite Turán number, denoted by
, is the maximum number of edges among H-free bipartite graphs with two parts of sizes m and n for a given bipartite graph H. Denote by
the set of extremal bipartite H-free graphs on n vertices with
edges. The problem of determining the value of
for any given graph H is called the bipartite Turán problem, which is closely related to the Turán problem. Denote a path on l vertices by
. Gyárfás, Rousseau and Schelp [10] considered the bipartite Turán number of paths.
Theorem 4. [10] Let
. Then
(1)
Let
be a matching of k edges. The below result, due to Li, Tu and Jin [11], shows us
for
and the corresponding extremal graph.
Theorem 5. [11] Let
. Then
.
Moreover, the unique extremal graph is
.
For two positive integers m, n and a given graph H, let
denote the smallest positive integer s such that if G is a bipartite graph with two parts A, B, where
,
, and G has at least s edges, then G must contain H as a subgraph. Clearly,
. A cycle consisted of l vertices is denoted as
. Kővári, Sós and Turán [4] obtained the classical result that
. For a constant c, Erdős, Sárközy and Sós [12] conjectured in 1995 that
(2)
when
and
(3)
when
.
(2) was confirmed by Sárközy [13]. (3) was first studied by Sárközy [13] and it was settled by Győri [14]. Motivated by the result on the bipartite Turán number of short cycle, Győri [14] proposed a more general conjecture of long cycles.
Conjecture 6. [14]
, where
,
.1
Győri [15] himself disproved Conjecture 6 for
. Balbuena et al. [16] further disproved it when
. In 2021, Li and Ning [17] showed that
for
, which improved a result of Jackson in [18].
When the forbidden subgraph H is a complete bipartite graph, the problem of determining the value
is closely related to the Zarankiewicz problem. In 1951, Zarankiewicz [19] proposed the following question: Determine the smallest positive integer
such that each
-matrix with m rows and n columns containing
1’s has a submatrix with s rows and t columns consisting entirely of 1’s. Combined with the adjacency matrix of bipartite graph, this extremal problem may be formulated in graph-theoretic terms. It is equivalent to find the least positive integer
such that each bipartite graph on m black vertices and n white vertices with
edges has a complete bipartite subgraph on s black vertices and t white vertices. In [20]-[22], use
to represent the maximum number of edges among bipartite graphs
with
and
such that they do not contain any complete bipartite graph with s vertices in A and t vertices in B. The corresponding extremal family of bipartite graphs is denoted by
. Obviously,
and
,
. Note that, when
,
and
or
,
; however, there is
.
Goddard, Henning and Oellermann [20] obtained the exact values of
for
and showed that in some cases the family
contains only
one extremal graph. Kővári, Sós and Turán [4] proved that
.
Further, if q is a prime, then
. Griggs and Ouyang [21] studied the so-called “half–half” case, i.e., the function
.
Theorem 7. [21] Let
. Then
,
where
is the greatest common divisor of s and t.
In 2007, Balbuena et al. [22] determined the exact value of
and characterized the family
of extremal graphs if
. They gave the following results.
Theorem 8. [22] Let
be four integers with
,
and such that
. Then
(4)
where M is any matching with cardinality
.
In this article, we prove the following result by virtue of algebra method. Our proof is different from the one of Theorem 8, but it is inspired by the method using
-matrices due to Zarankiewicz in [19].
Theorem 9. Let
be three positive integers with
. Then
.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we first introduce some notations and definitions. By virtue of adjacency matrix, the proof of Theorem 9 is given. In Section 3, we give some concluding remarks.
2. Preliminaries and Proofs
Before giving the proof, we introduce some notations and definitions. In this paper, a graph
is denoted as a bipartite graph, where
,
and every edge in
has one endpoint in A and the other in B. Call
a complete bipartite graph if every vertex in A is adjacent to all vertices in B and usually denote it by
when
and
. A bipartite graph
is balanced if
. A matching of graph H is a subset of
in which no two edges share a same vertex. We say that vertex v is a saturated vertex of M if v is incident with an edge in the matching M. Otherwise, the vertex v is an exposed vertex of M. A matching of H is maximum if there is no matching with greater cardinality in H.
Next, we introduce the adjacency matrix of a bipartite graph that describes structural properties of graphs. Let
be a bipartite graph with two parts
and
. The adjacency matrix of F is an
matrix M with 1 or 0 in the position of
corresponding to
and
are adjacent or not, respectively, for
and
. When we delete t edges of a bipartite graph, its adjacency matrix will have t corresponding elements changed from 1 to 0.
For example, let
be a bipartite graph as shown in Figure 1 with
,
and
.
Figure 1. Bipartite graph F.
Denote the adjacency matrix of bipartite graph F by M. Then we have
(5)
After deleting the edges
and
of graph F, the corresponding adjacency matrix
is as below.
(6)
Next, we give the proof of our result by virtue of adjacency matrices of bipartite graphs and graph structural analysis.
Proof of Theorem 9.
Proof. Let
be three positive integers with
. Assume that complete bipartite graph
and
,
.
Firstly, we prove that
. Consider graph
which is obtained by deleting a matching
of cardinality
from the complete bipartite graph
. We prove that
does not contain
as a subgraph. Otherwise, we may assume that
contains a
which has two parts
and
and
,
. Then
contains at least
saturated vertices of
. Noting that the number of vertices in
is t, at least one saturated vertex in
is adjacent to some saturated vertex of
, which implies that at least one edge in
belongs to
. It is a contradiction. So
, with
edges, does not contain
as a subgraph. Therefore,
.
Next, we prove that
. That is to say, it needs to be proved that after arbitrarily deleted 2t edges of
, the resulting graph contains
as a subgraph. We use the adjacency matrix of the bipartite graph to prove this. After 2t edges are deleted from
, there are 2t elements in the adjacency matrix of
changed from 1 to 0. Denote this adjacency matrix by C. We need to prove that C has a sub-matrix
with
rows and
columns whose elements are all 1’s. We rearrange the rows of matrix C in the order of increasing numbers of 0’s and label them row (1), row (2),
, row (m). Denote such a matrix by
. Obviously, for
, the number of 0’s in row (j) is 0. Besides, we have the following claim.
Claim 1. For
, the number of 0’s in the row
is at most 1 in
.
Proof. If the number of 0’s in the row
is at least 2, then the number of 0’s in each row
is at least 2, where
. Hence, the number of 0’s in matrix
is at least
, contradicting that matrix
has 2t 0’s. Therefore, the number of 0’s in the row
is at most 1. It follows that the number of 0’s in row
is also at most 1, where
. The proof is completed.
Therefore, the number of 0’s in the first
rows is at most t. For the first
rows, we delete the columns of
which include element 0. Then there are at least
columns whose elements are all 1’s. We label these
columns as column (1), column (2),
, column
. Now the intersection of row (1), row (2),
, row
and column (1), column (2),
, column
forms a sub-matrix
whose elements are all 1’s. Hence, after arbitrarily deleted 2t edges of
, the resulting graph contains
as a subgraph. So
.
Therefore, we have
. The proof is completed.
3. Concluding Remarks
As it well known, for positive integers m, n and t with
, the value of
has been solved by Balbuena et al. [22] in 2007, whose proof focuses more on the structural analysis of bipartite graphs. However, in this article, we provide a new perspective to prove the value of
. By the virtue of algebra method, we use the tool of adjacency matrices of bipartite graphs to prove this result. By Theorem 9, the result of the Turán number of the balanced bipartite graphs may be drawn naturally.
Corollary 10. Let
be two positive integers with
. Then
.
When
, Balbuena et al. [22] proved that
. And for
, the value of
has only been resolved in a few cases. There are still a lot of works that can be studied for the bipartite Turán number problem of bipartite graphs. Other tools may be explored to solve the related questions. For instance, laplacian spectral radius of bipartite graphs [23] may be used to solve bipartite Turán number problem of bipartite graphs. And in [24], the methods of finding rainbow matching in bipartite graphs are also worth learning to solve the related extreme value problem.
NOTES
1The original conjectured value
in [14] may be a misprint (see the remark on page 748 in [16]).