COMBINATORICA is an international journal of
the Bolyai Mathematical Society, Hungary,
published jointly by
the Bolyai Mathematical Society and Springer.

COMBINATORICA publishes research papers in a variety of areas of combinatorics and the theory of computing, with particular emphasis on general techniques and unifying principles.
Coverage in COMBINATORICA includes:

• combinatorial structures (graphs, matroids, hypergraphs, designs, permutation groups);
• combinatorial optimization;
• combinatorial aspects of geometry and number theory;
• algorithms in combinatorics and related fields;
• computational complexity theory;
• randomization and explicit construction in combinatorics and algorithms.

Six issues appear each year. A total of 30-40 papers are accepted for publication out of roughly 300 submissions per year.

Editors-in-Chief

Imre Bárány, Rényi Institute of Mathematics, Budapest
József Solymosi, University of British Columbia

Founding editors

László Babai, University of Chicago
László Lovász, ELTE Eötvös University, Budapest

Managing editors

Csaba Király, ELTE Eötvös University, Budapest
Zoltán Lóránt Nagy, ELTE Eötvös University, Budapest
Lilla Tóthmérész, ELTE Eötvös University, Budapest
Viktor Harangi, Rényi Institute of Mathematics, Budapest

Honorary editors

Gyula O.H. Katona, Rényi Institute of Mathematics, Budapest
Miklós Simonovits, Rényi Institute of Mathematics, Budapest
Endre Szemerédi, Rényi Institute of Mathematics, Budapest

Board of editors

Miklós Abért, Rényi Institute of Mathematics, Budapest
Noga Alon, Tel Aviv University & Princeton University
József Balogh, University of Illinois
Anders Björner, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm
Béla Bollobás, University of Cambridge & The University of Memphis
Maria Chudnovsky, Princeton University
András Frank, ELTE Eötvös University, Budapest
Peter Frankl, Rényi Institute of Mathematics, Budapest
Zoltán Füredi, Rényi Institute of Mathematics, Budapest
Péter Komjáth, ELTE Eötvös University, Budapest
Nathan Linial, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Jaroslav Nešetřil, Charles University, Prague
János Pach, Rényi Institute of Mathematics, Budapest & EPFL, Lausanne
Alexander A. Razborov, University of Chicago & Steklov Math. Inst., Moscow
Vojtěch Rödl, Emory University, Atlanta
Imre Z. Ruzsa, Rényi Institute of Mathematics, Budapest
Lisa Sauermann, MIT
Alexander Schrijver, CWI Amsterdam & University of Amsterdam
Alexander Scott, University of Oxford
Paul D. Seymour, Princeton University
Benny Sudakov, ETH, Zürich
Gábor Tardos, Rényi Institute of Mathematics, Budapest
Van H. Vu, Yale University
Avi Wigderson, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

Instructions for authors

1. Submission. Manuscripts should be submitted via the editorial system EditFlow. Please use the following link: https://ef.msp.org/submit/combinatorica
2. Length. The length of the paper should not exceed 30 pages (in 11-point LaTeX format on US letter-size paper with 1-inch margins). Authors of longer papers are advised to submit a 30-page version to COMBINATORICA with a link to a full version on arXiv.
3. Notes. Short notes are welcome and processed in an expedited fashion.
4. Form of the manuscript. The manuscript should contain a brief abstract. In a paper divided into sections, it is desirable to number theorems, lemmas, definitions, corollaries, examples, etc. consecutively using double Arabic numerals. (E.g., Section 3 may start with Definition 3.1 followed by Remark 3.2 and Theorem 3.3).
5. Style. Clarity of the presentation is paramount. The results should be made accessible to the non-specialist reader. Authors should give clear motivation, background, and exact references.
6. Final version. If the paper is accepted, the following should be submitted.
   • The final version of the paper in TeX/LaTeX format. It is best to avoid using complicated macros or non-standard packages and fonts as they tend to be in conflict with the journal format. Furthermore, it significantly simplifies the typesetting process if unused packages and definitions are deleted by the author. In general, a plain "vanilla" version is the least prone to errors when adapting it to the journal format.
   • Each figure in a separate file (in a vector graphic format that can handle embedded fonts such as EPS or vector PDF). Note that while the online version is published in color, the print version is converted to grayscale. Ensure that the figure can still be understood even when it is printed in grayscale. For example, avoid referring to colors in the text.
   • Affiliation and e-mail address for each author.
   • Abbreviated title (at most 35 characters), to be used as the running head.
   • Mathematics Subject Classification codes (primary and secondary).
7. Reprints. 50 Reprints are provided free of charge upon request. Additional reprints may be ordered.

Volume 45, Issue 2, 2025

William Linz
L-Systems and the Lovász Number
45:12  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-025-00136-4

Oliver Roche-Newton
A Lower Bound for the Number of Pinned Angles Determined by a Cartesian Product Set
45:13  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-025-00135-5

Congkai Huang
Improved Lower Bound Towards Chen–Chvátal Conjecture
45:14  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-025-00137-3

David Hartman, Tomáš Hons, Jaroslav Nešetřil
Gadget Construction and Structural Convergence
45:15  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-025-00140-8

Yulai Ma, Davide Mattiolo, Eckhard Steffen, Isaak H. Wolf
Sets of r-Graphs that Color All r-Graphs
45:16  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-025-00144-4

András Mészáros
Bounds on the Mod 2 Homology of Random 2-Dimensional Determinantal Hypertrees
45:17  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-025-00142-6

Jie Ma, Long-Tu Yuan
Supersaturation Beyond Color-Critical Graphs
45:18  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-025-00143-5

Winfried Hochstättler, Sophia Keip, Kolja Knauer
The Signed Varchenko Determinant for Complexes of Oriented Matroids
45:19  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-025-00138-2

Jinzhuan Cai, Jin Guo, Alexander L. Gavrilyuk, Ilia Ponomarenko
A Large Family of Strongly Regular Graphs with Small Weisfeiler-Leman Dimension
45:20  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-025-00145-3

Jie Ma, Tianchi Yang
A Hypergraph Bipartite Turán Problem with Odd Uniformity
45:21  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-025-00146-2

Penny Haxell, Tibor Szabó
Improved Integrality Gap in Max–Min Allocation, or, Topology at the North Pole
45:22  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-025-00141-7

Lior Gishboliner, Oliver Janzer, Benny Sudakov
Induced Subgraphs of Kr-Free Graphs and the Erdős–Rogers Problem
45:23  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-025-00147-1

Alan Lew, Eran Nevo, Yuval Peled, Orit E. Raz
Rigidity Expander Graphs
45:24  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-025-00149-z

Noga Alon, Colin Defant, Noah Kravitz, Daniel G. Zhu
Ordering Candidates via Vantage Points
45:25  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-025-00148-0

János Pach, Dmitrii Zakharov
Ruzsa’s Problem on Bi-Sidon Sets
45:26  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-025-00151-5

Volume 45, Issue 1, 2025

Tomas Juškevičius, Valentas Kurauskas
Anticoncentration of Random Vectors via the Strong Perfect Graph Theorem
45:1  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-024-00124-0

Siddharth Bhandari, Abhishek Khetan
Improved Upper Bound for the Size of a Trifferent Code
45:2  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-024-00130-2

Rafał Kalinowski, Monika Pilśniak, Marcin Stawiski
Unfriendly Partition Conjecture Holds for Line Graphs
45:3  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-024-00131-1

Xiao Han
A New Bound for the Fourier-Entropy-Influence Conjecture
45:4  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-024-00133-z

Antonio Montero, Micael Toledo
Chiral Extensions of Regular Toroids
45:5  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-024-00132-0

Agelos Georgakopoulos
The Excluded Minors for Embeddability into a Compact Surface
45:6  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-024-00129-9

Lina Li, Gweneth McKinley, Jinyoung Park
The Number of Colorings of the Middle Layers of the Hamming Cube
45:7  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-024-00128-w

Saba Lepsveridze, Aleksandre Saatashvili, Yufei Zhao
Uniacute Spherical Codes
45:8  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-024-00125-z

Gal Beniamini, Nir Lavee, Nati Linial
How Balanced Can Permutations Be?
45:9  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-024-00127-x

Claudio Alexandre Piedade, Philippe Tranchida
Constructing New Geometries: A Generalized Approach to Halving for Hypertopes
45:10  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-024-00134-y

František Kardoš, Edita Máčajová, Jean Paul Zerafa
Three-Cuts are a Charm: Acyclicity in 3-Connected Cubic Graphs
45:11  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-024-00126-y

Volume 44, Issue 6, 2024

Christopher Cornwell, Nathan McNew
Links and the Diaconis–Graham Inequality
Pages 1149-1167  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-024-00107-1

Jim Geelen, Matthew E. Kroeker
Unavoidable Flats in Matroids Representable over Prime Fields
Pages 1169-1176  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-024-00112-4

Xueping Huang, Shiping Liu, Qing Xia
Bounding the Diameter and Eigenvalues of Amply Regular Graphs via Lin–Lu–Yau Curvature
Pages 1177-1192  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-024-00113-3

Alexander Barg, Moshe Schwartz, Lev Yohananov
Storage Codes on Coset Graphs with Asymptotically Unit Rate
Pages 1193-1209  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-024-00114-2

Jaroslav Nešetřil, Vojtěch Rödl, Marcelo Sales
On Pisier Type Theorems
Pages 1211-1232  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-024-00115-1

Dong Yeap Kang, Tom Kelly, Daniela Kühn, Vincent Pfenninger
Perfect Matchings in Random Sparsifications of Dirac Hypergraphs
Pages 1233-1266  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-024-00116-0

Alex Scott, Paul Seymour, Sophie Spirkl
Pure Pairs. VIII. Excluding a Sparse Graph
Pages 1267-1295  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-024-00117-z

Johannes Carmesin
A Whitney Type Theorem for Surfaces: Characterising Graphs with Locally Planar Embeddings
Pages 1297-1323  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-024-00118-y

Robert Connelly, Steven J. Gortler, Louis Theran
Reconstruction in One Dimension from Unlabeled Euclidean Lengths
Pages 1325-1351  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-024-00119-x

Saveliy V. Skresanov
On Directed and Undirected Diameters of Vertex-Transitive Graphs
Pages 1353-1366  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-024-00120-4

Gabriel Currier, Kenneth Moore, Chi Hoi Yip
Any Two-Coloring of the Plane Contains Monochromatic 3-Term Arithmetic Progressions
Pages 1367-1380  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-024-00122-2

Debsoumya Chakraborti, Jaehoon Kim, Hyunwoo Lee, Jaehyeon Seo
Hamilton Transversals in Tournaments
Pages 1381-1400  |  DOI:10.1007/s00493-024-00123-1

Top 20 most-cited papers (1981-1999)

Lubotzky, A.; Phillips, R.; Sarnak, P.
Ramanujan graphs
Volume 8 (1988), Issue 3, 261–277

Karmarkar, N.
A new polynomial-time algorithm for linear programming
Volume 4 (1984), Issue 4, 373–395

Grötschel, M.; Lovász, L.; Schrijver, A.
The ellipsoid method and its consequences in combinatorial optimization
Volume 1 (1981), Issue 2, 169–197

Alon, N.
Eigenvalues and expanders
Volume 6 (1986), Issue 2, 83–96

Linial, Nathan; London, Eran; Rabinovich, Yuri
The geometry of graphs and some of its algorithmic applications
Volume 15 (1995), Issue 2, 215–245

Alon, N.; Tarsi, M.
Colorings and orientations of graphs
Volume 12 (1992), Issue 2, 125–134

Chung, F. R. K.; Graham, R. L.; Wilson, R. M.
Quasi-random graphs
Volume 9 (1989), Issue 4, 345–362

Szemerédi, Endre; Trotter, William T., Jr.
Extremal problems in discrete geometry
Volume 3 (1983), Issue 3-4, 381–392

de Fraysseix, H.; Pach, J.; Pollack, R.
How to draw a planar graph on a grid
Volume 10 (1990), Issue 1, 41–51

Frankl, P.; Wilson, R. M.
Intersection theorems with geometric consequences
Volume 1 (1981), Issue 4, 357–368

Godsil, C. D.
On the full automorphism group of a graph
Volume 1 (1981), Issue 3, 243–256

Füredi, Z.; Komlós, J.
The eigenvalues of random symmetric matrices
Volume 1 (1981), Issue 3, 233–241

Frieze, Alan; Kannan, Ravi
Quick approximation to matrices and applications
Volume 19 (1999), Issue 2, 175–220

Komlós, János; Sárközy, Gábor N.; Szemerédi, Endre
Blow-up lemma
Volume 17 (1997), Issue 1, 109–123

Wilson, Richard M.
The exact bound in the Erdős-Ko-Rado theorem
Volume 4 (1984), Issue 2-3, 247–257

Pach, János; Tóth, Géza
Graphs drawn with few crossings per edge
Volume 17 (1997), Issue 3, 427–439

Babai, L.
On Lovász' lattice reduction and the nearest lattice point problem
Volume 6 (1986), Issue 1, 1–13

Mulmuley, Ketan; Vazirani, Umesh V.; Vazirani, Vijay V.
Matching is as easy as matrix inversion
Volume 7 (1987), Issue 1, 105–113

Raghavan, P.; Thompson, C. D.
Randomized rounding: a technique for provably good algorithms and algorithmic proofs
Volume 7 (1987), Issue 4, 365–374

Robertson, Neil; Seymour, Paul; Thomas, Robin
Hadwiger's conjecture for K6-free graphs
Volume 13 (1993), Issue 3, 279–361

Top 10 most-cited papers (2000-2009)

Jain, Kamal
A factor 2 approximation algorithm for the generalized Steiner network problem
Volume 21 (2001), Issue 1, 39–60

Bollobás, Béla; Riordan, Oliver
The diameter of a scale-free random graph
Volume 24 (2004), Issue 1, 5–34

Chudnovsky, Maria; Cornuéjols, Gérard; Liu, Xinming; Seymour, Paul; Vušković, Kristina
Recognizing Berge graphs
Volume 25 (2005), Issue 2, 143–186

Alon, Noga; Fischer, Eldar; Krivelevich, Michael; Szegedy, Mario
Efficient testing of large graphs
Volume 20 (2000), Issue 4, 451–476

Tao, Terence
Product set estimates for non-commutative groups
Volume 28 (2008), Issue 5, 547–594

Linial, Nathan; Meshulam, Roy
Homological connectivity of random 2-complexes
Volume 26 (2006), Issue 4, 475–487

Kim, Jeong Han; Vu, Van H.
Concentration of multivariate polynomials and its applications
Volume 20 (2000), Issue 3, 417–434

Thomassé, Stéphan; Yeo, Anders
Total domination of graphs and small transversals of hypergraphs
Volume 27 (2007), Issue 4, 473–487

Goldreich, Oded; Goldwasser, Shafi; Lehman, Eric; Ron, Dana; Samorodnitsky, Alex
Testing monotonicity
Volume 20 (2000), Issue 3, 301–337

Kühn, Daniela; Osthus, Deryk
The minimum degree threshold for perfect graph packings
Volume 29 (2009), Issue 1, 65–107

Top 10 most-cited papers (2010-2019)

Sebő, András; Vygen, Jens
Shorter tours by nicer ears: 7/5-approximation for the graph-TSP, 3/2 for the path version, and 4/3 for two-edge-connected subgraphs
Volume 34 (2014), Issue 5, 597–629

Petridis, Giorgis
New proofs of Plünnecke-type estimates for product sets in groups
Volume 32 (2012), Issue 6, 721–733

Tóth, Csaba D.
The Szemerédi-Trotter theorem in the complex plane
Volume 35 (2015), Issue 1, 95–126

Ceballos, Cesar; Santos, Francisco; Ziegler, Günter M.
Many non-equivalent realizations of the associahedron
Volume 35 (2015), Issue 5, 513–551

Dujmović, Vida; Joret, Gwenaël; Kozik, Jakub; Wood, David R.
Nonrepetitive colouring via entropy compression
Volume 36 (2016), Issue 6, 661–686

Chudnovsky, Maria; Seymour, Paul
The three-in-a-tree problem
Volume 30 (2010), Issue 4, 387–417

Füredi, Zoltán; Jiang, Tao; Seiver, Robert
Exact solution of the hypergraph Turán problem for k-uniform linear paths
Volume 34 (2014), Issue 3, 299–322

Raigorodskii, A. M.
On the chromatic numbers of spheres in Rn
Volume 32 (2012), Issue 1, 111–123

Cilleruelo, Javier
Combinatorial problems in finite fields and Sidon sets
Volume 32 (2012), Issue 5, 497–511

Devos, Matt; Dvořák, Zdeněk; Fox, Jacob; McDonald, Jessica; Mohar, Bojan; Scheide, Diego
A minimum degree condition forcing complete graph immersion
Volume 34 (2014), Issue 3, 279–298

Rudnev, Misha
On the number of incidences between points and planes in three dimensions
Volume 38 (2018), Issue 1, 219–254