Quasiplanar graphs, string graphs, and the Erd\H os-Gallai problem

An $r$-quasiplanar graph is a graph drawn in the plane with no $r$ pairwise crossing edges. We prove that there is a constant $C>0$ such that for any $s>2$, every $2^s$-quasiplanar graph with $n$ vertices has at most $n(\frac{C\log n}{s})^{2s-4}$ edges. A graph whose vertices are continuous curves in the plane, two being connected by an edge if and only if they intersect, is called a \emph{string graph}. We show that for every $\epsilon>0$, there exists $\delta>0$ such that every string graph with $n$ vertices, whose chromatic number is at least $n^{\epsilon}$ contains a clique of size at least $n^{\delta}$. A clique of this size or a coloring using fewer than $n^{\epsilon}$ colors can be found by a polynomial time algorithm in terms of the size of the geometric representation of the set of strings. For every $r\ge 3$, we construct families of $n$ segments in the plane without $r$ pairwise crossing members, which have the property that in any coloring of the segments with fewer than $c \log\log n $ colors, at least one of the color classes contains $r-1$ pairwise crossing segments. Here $c=c(r)>0$ is a suitable constant. In the process, we use, generalize, and strengthen previous results of Lee, Tomon, Walczak, and others. All of our theorems are related to geometric variants of the following classical graph-theoretic problem of Erd\H os, Gallai, and Rogers. Given a $K_r$-free graph on $n$ vertices and an integer $s<r$, at least how many vertices can we find such that the subgraph induced by them is $K_s$-free?