Avoidability beyond paths

08/26/2022

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by   Vladimir Gurvich, et al.

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The concept of avoidable paths in graphs was introduced by Beisegel, Chudnovsky, Gurvich, Milanič, and Servatius in 2019 as a common generalization of avoidable vertices and simplicial paths. In 2020, Bonamy, Defrain, Hatzel, and Thiebaut proved that every graph containing an induced path of order k also contains an avoidable induced path of the same order. They also asked whether one could generalize this result to other avoidable structures, leaving the notion of avoidability up to interpretation. In this paper we address this question: we specify the concept of avoidability for arbitrary graphs equipped with two terminal vertices and provide both positive and negative results.