Sublinear Longest Path Transversals and Gallai Families.

We show that connected graphs admit sublinear longest path transversals. This improves an earlier result of Rautenbach and Sereni and is related to the fifty-year-old question of whether connected graphs admit constant-size longest path transversals. The same technique allows us to show that $2$-connected graphs admit sublinear longest cycle transversals. We also make progress toward a characterization of the graphs $H$ such that every connected $H$-free graph has a longest path transversal of size $1$. In particular, we show that the graphs $H$ on at most $4$ vertices satisfying this property are exactly the linear forests. Finally, we show that if the order of a connected graph $G$ is large relative to its connectivity $\kappa(G)$ and $\alpha(G) \le \kappa(G) + 2$, then each vertex of maximum degree forms a longest path transversal of size $1$.