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Graph Bootstrap Percolation – A Discovery of Slowness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 June 2026

Andrei Gagarin
Affiliation:
Cardiff University
Roger Behrend
Affiliation:
Cardiff University
Matthew Lettington
Affiliation:
Cardiff University
Iskander Aliev
Affiliation:
Cardiff University
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Summary

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.

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