We show that for any n divisible by 3, almost all order-n Steiner triple systems have a perfect matching (also known as a parallel class or resolution class). In fact, we prove a general upper bound on the number of perfect matchings in a Steiner triple system and show that almost all Steiner triple systems essentially attain this maximum. We accomplish this via a general theorem comparing a uniformly random Steiner triple system to the outcome of the triangle removal process, which we hope will be useful for other problems. Our methods can also be adapted to other types of designs; for example, we sketch a proof of the theorem that almost all Latin squares have transversals.

We show that for any fixed dense graph G and bounded-degree tree T on the same number of vertices, a modest random perturbation of G will typically contain a copy of T . This combines the viewpoints of the well-studied problems of embedding trees into fixed dense graphs and into random graphs, and extends a sizeable body of existing research on randomly perturbed graphs. Specifically, we show that there is c = c(α, ∆) such that if G is an n-vertex graph with minimum degree at least αn, and T is an n-vertex tree with maximum degree at most ∆, then if we add cn uniformly random edges to G, the resulting graph will contain T asymptotically almost surely (as n → ∞). Our proof uses a lemma concerning the decomposition of a dense graph into super-regular pairs of comparable sizes, which may be of independent interest.

An n-vertex graph is called C-Ramsey if it has no clique or independent set of size C log n. All known constructions of Ramsey graphs involve randomness in an essential way, and there is an ongoing line of research towards showing that in fact all Ramsey graphs must obey certain "richness" properties characteristic of random graphs. Motivated by an old problem of Erdős and McKay, recently Narayanan, Sahasrabudhe and Tomon conjectured that for any fixed C, every n-vertex C-Ramsey graph induces subgraphs of Θ n 2 different sizes. In this paper we prove this conjecture.

We give several results showing that different discrete structures typically gain certain spanning substructures (in particular, Hamilton cycles) after a modest random perturbation. First, we prove that adding linearly many random edges to a dense k-uniform hypergraph ensures the (asymptotically almost sure) existence of a perfect matching or a loose Hamilton cycle. The proof involves an interesting application of Szemerédi's Regularity Lemma, which might be independently useful. We next prove that digraphs with certain strong expansion properties are pancyclic, and use this to show that adding a linear number of random edges typically makes a dense digraph pancyclic. Finally, we prove that perturbing a certain (minimum-degreedependent) number of random edges in a tournament typically ensures the existence of multiple edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles. All our results are tight.