Inducibility and universality for trees

Timothy F. N. Chan, Daniel Kral, Bojan Mohar, David R. Wood

Published 2021-02-03Version 1

We answer three questions posed by Bubeck and Linial on the limit densities of subtrees in trees. We prove there exist positive $\varepsilon_1$ and $\varepsilon_2$ such that every tree that is neither a path nor a star has inducibility at most $1-\varepsilon_1$, where the inducibility of a tree $T$ is defined as the maximum limit density of $T$, and that there are infinitely many trees with inducibility at least $\varepsilon_2$. Finally, we construct a universal sequence of trees; that is, a sequence in which the limit density of any tree is positive.