Solution
ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2006/iii/paper-14/4/c/solution
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2006 iii Paper 14 4 c Solution by
Codex 0 Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
A connected graph with has no isolated vertices. Conversely, a disconnected graph with no isolated vertices has a connected component with size between and . We must show that this latter event has probability tending to zero.
The permitted component-size estimate excludes sizes between and with high probability. For the remaining small sizes, let count components with vertices. A connected graph on a fixed -vertex set contains a spanning tree. By the Cayley formula, there are labelled trees, as follows from the Prüfer code bijection between labelled trees and sequences of labels. A union bound over the trees, together with the absence of every edge to the complementary vertex set, givesPut and . Using and , uniformly for we obtainHere . Therefore, with ,The Markov inequality excludes all these small components with high probability. Together with the permitted estimate, this proves that the difference between the probability of connectivity and the probability of no isolated vertices tends to zero. Hence
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