A subset S of initially infected vertices of a graph G is called forcing if we can infect the entire graph by iteratively applying the following process. At each step, any infected vertex which has a unique uninfected neighbour, infects this neighbour. The forcing number of G is the minimum cardinality of a forcing set in G. In the present paper, we study the forcing number of various classes of graphs, including graphs of large girth, H-free graphs for a fixed bipartite graph H, random and pseudorandom graphs.

A sequence S is called anagram-free if it contains no consecutive symbols r1r2. . .rkrk+1. . .r2k such that rk+1. . .r2k is a permutation of the block r1r2. . .rk. Answering a question of Erdős and Brown, Keränen constructed an infinite anagram-free sequence on four symbols. Motivated by the work of Alon, Grytczuk, Hałuszczak and Riordan [2], we consider a natural generalization of anagram-free sequences for graph colourings. A colouring of the vertices of a given graph G is called anagram-free if the sequence of colours on any path in G is anagram-free. We call the minimal number of colours needed for such a colouring the anagram-chromatic number of G.In this paper we study the anagram-chromatic number of several classes of graphs like trees, minor-free graphs and bounded-degree graphs. Surprisingly, we show that there are bounded-degree graphs (such as random regular graphs) in which anagrams cannot be avoided unless we essentially give each vertex a separate colour.

Let c be an edge-coloring of the complete n-vertex graph K n . The problem of finding properly colored and rainbow Hamilton cycles in c was initiated in 1976 by Bollobás and Erdős and has been extensively studied since then. Recently it was extended to the hypergraph setting by Dudek, Frieze and Ruciński [9]. We generalize these results, giving sufficient local (resp. global) restrictions on the colorings which guarantee a properly colored (resp. rainbow) copy of a given hypergraph G.We also study multipartite analogues of these questions. We give (up to a constant factor) optimal sufficient conditions for a coloring c of the complete balanced m-partite graph to contain a properly colored or rainbow copy of a given graph G with maximum degree ∆. Our bounds exhibit a surprising transition in the rate of growth, showing that the problem is fundamentally different in the regimes ∆ ≫ m and ∆ ≪ m Our main tool is the framework of Lu and Székely for the space of random bijections, which we extend to product spaces.

A graph G is Ramsey for a graph H if every 2-coloring of the edges of G contains a monochromatic copy of H. We consider the following question: if H has bounded treewidth, is there a ``sparse"" graph G that is Ramsey for H? Two notions of sparsity are considered. Firstly, we show that if the maximum degree and treewidth of H are bounded, then there is a graph G with O(| V (H)| ) edges that is Ramsey for H. This was previously only known for the smaller class of graphs H with bounded bandwidth. On the other hand, we prove that in general the treewidth of a graph G that is Ramsey for H cannot be bounded in terms of the treewidth of H alone. In fact, the latter statement is true even if the treewidth is replaced by the degeneracy and H is a tree.

An edge (vertex) coloured graph is rainbow-connected if there is a rainbow path between any two vertices, i.e. a path all of whose edges (internal vertices) carry distinct colours. Rainbow edge (vertex) connectivity of a graph G is the smallest number of colours needed for a rainbow edge (vertex) colouring of G. In this paper we propose a very simple approach to studying rainbow connectivity in graphs. Using this idea, we give a unified proof of several known results, as well as some new ones.