Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 June 2026
Graph bootstrap percolation is a discrete-time process capturing the spread of a virus on the edges of Kn. Given an initial set G ⊆ Kn of infected edges, the transmission of the virus is governed by a fixed graph H: in each round of the process, any edge e of Kn that is the last uninfected edge in a copy of H in Kn gets infected as well. Once infected, edges remain infected forever. The process was introduced by Bollobás in 1968 in the context of weak saturation and has since inspired a vast array of beautiful mathematics. The main focus of this survey is the extremal question of how long the infection process can last before stabilising. We give an exposition of our recent systematic study of this maximum running time and the inuence of the infection rule H. The topic turns out to possess a wide variety of interesting behaviour, with connections to additive, extremal, and probabilistic combinatorics. Along the way, we encounter a number of surprises and attractive open problems.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.