We show that the product in the quantum K-ring of a generalized flag manifold G/P involves only finitely many powers of the Novikov variables. In contrast to previous approaches to this finiteness question, we exploit the finite difference module structure of quantum K-theory. At the core of the proof is a bound on the asymptotic growth of the J-function, which in turn comes from an analysis of the singularities of the zastava spaces studied in geometric representation theory. An appendix by H. Iritani establishes the equivalence between finiteness and a quadratic growth condition on certain shift operators.

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Let $f(n)$ be the maximum number of edges in a graph on $n$ vertices in which no two cycles have the same length. In 1975, Erdős raised the question of determining $f(n)$ [see J. A. Bondy and U. S. R. Murty, Graph theory with applications, Elsevier, New York, 1976; MR0411988 (54 #117)]. We prove that for $n\geq 36\cdot 5t^2-4\cdot 5t+1$ one has $f(n)\geq n+9t-1$ . We conjecture that $\liminf (f(n)-n)/\sqrt n\leq\sqrt 3$ .

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For any r-order {0,1}-tensor A with e ones, we prove that the spectral radius of A is at most exp((r-1)/r) with the equality holds if and only if e=k^r for some integer k and all ones forms a principal sub-tensor 1_{k x k x ... x k}. We also prove a stability result for general tensor A with e ones where e = k^r+l with relatively small l. Using the stability result, we completely characterized the tensors achieving the maximum spectral radius among all r-order {0,1}-tensor A with k^r+l ones, for -r-1 ≤ l ≤ r, and k sufficiently large.