Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2026/ii/paper-4/17j/a/solution

This is Dirac theorem. Take a longest path . All neighbours of its ends lie on it. If no index has both and , the two end-neighbour sets have total size at most , contradicting . Such an index closes a cycle through the path, and maximality plus connectedness makes it Hamiltonian. For even , the disjoint union of two copies of has minimum degree and is not Hamiltonian. For odd , has minimum degree and no Hamilton cycle because its bipartition sizes differ.

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