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Middle Levels Conjecture


The middle levels conjecture (Havel 1983, Buck and Wiedemann 1984), also known as revolving door conjecture, posits that the middle layer graph of order n has a Hamilton cycle for every n>=1.

The conjecture was proved by Mütze (2016); see also Mütze (2024).

Since the middle levels graphs are vertex-transitive, proving the conjecture established that these graphs are not counterexamples to Thomassen's conjecture on nonhamiltonian vertex-transitive graphs.

Knuth (2021) gave the middle levels conjecture the highest difficulty rating (49/50) among all open problems in his book (Mütze 2024).


See also

Hamilton Cycle, Middle Layer Graph, Vertex-Transitive Graph

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References

Buck, M. and Wiedemann, D. "Gray Codes With Restricted Density." Disc. Math. 48, 163-171, 1984.Diaconis, P. and Graham, R. Magical Mathematics: The Mathematical Ideas That Animate Great Magic Tricks. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UNiversity Press, 2011.Felsner, S. and Trotter, W. T. "Colorings of Diagrams of Interval Orders and alpha-Sequences of Sets." Disc. Math. 144, 23-31, 1995.Havel, I. "Semipaths in Directed Cubes." In Graphs and Other Combinatorial Topics (Prague, 1982). Leipzig, Germany: Teubner, pp. 101-108, 1983.Kierstead, H. A. and Trotter, W. T. "Explicit Matchings in the Middle Levels of the Boolean Lattice." Order 5, 163-171, 1988.Knuth, D. E. The Art of Computer Programming, Vol. 4A: Combinatorial Algorithms, Part 1. New York: Addison-Wesley, 2021.Mütze, T. "Proof of the Middle Levels Conjecture." 11 Aug 2014. https://arxiv.org/abs/1404.4442.Mütze, T. "On Hamilton Cycles in Graphs Defined by Intersecting Set Systems." Not. Amer. Soc. 74, 583-592, 2024.Savage, C. D. and Winkler, P. "Monotone Gray Codes and the Middle Levels Problem." J. Combin. Th. Ser. A 70, 230-248, 1995.Winkler, P. Mathematical Puzzles. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2003.

Cite this as:

Weisstein, Eric W. "Middle Levels Conjecture." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource. https://mathworld.wolfram.com/MiddleLevelsConjecture.html

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