J. Ramanujan Math. Soc. 18, No.1 (2003) 1–20 Ramanujan Graphs M. Ram Murty Department of Mathematics, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, K7L 3N6, Canada e-mail:
[email protected] Communicated by: Dipendra Prasad Received: January 8, 2003 In the last two decades, the theory of Ramanujan graphs has gained promi- nence primarily for two reasons. First, from a practical viewpoint, these graphs resolve an extremal problem in communication network theory (see for exam- ple [2]). Second, from a more aesthetic viewpoint, they fuse diverse branches of pure mathematics, namely, number theory, representation theory and alge- braic geometry. The purpose of this survey is to unify some of the recent developments and expose certain open problems in the area. This survey is by no means an exhaustive one and demonstrates a highly number-theoretic bias. For more comprehensive surveys, we refer the reader to [27], [9] or [13]. For a more up-to-date survey highlighting the connection between graph theory and automorphic representations, we refer the reader to Winnie Li’s recent survey article [11]. A graph X is a triple consisting of a vertex set V = V(X),anedge set E = E(X) and a map that associates to each edge two vertices (not necessarily distinct) called its endpoints.Aloop is an edge whose endpoints are equal. Multiple edges are edges having the same pair of endpoints. A simple graph is one having no loops or multiple edges. If a graph has loops or multiple edges, we will call it a multigraph. When two vertices u and v are endpoints of an edge, we say they are adjacent and (sometimes) write u ∼ v to indicate this.