On a conjecture of Bondy and Fan

Alan Frieze1, Colin McDiarmid2, Bruce Reed3
1Department of Mathematics Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburg, Pennsylvania
2Mathematical Institute Oxford University Oxford, England
3 Department of Combinatorics and Optimization University of Waterloo Waterloo, Ontario Canada N2L 3G1

Abstract

Bondy and Fan recently conjectured that if we associate non-negative real weights to the edges of a graph so that the sum of the edge weights is \(W\), then the graph contains a path whose weight is at least \(\frac{2W}{n}\). We prove this conjecture.