On Spanning Trees with few Branch Vertices Público

Shull, Warren (Spring 2018)

Permanent URL: https://etd.library.emory.edu/concern/etds/p2676v52c?locale=pt-BR
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Abstract

Hamiltonian paths, which are a special kind of spanning tree, have long been of interest in graph theory and are notoriously hard to compute. One notable feature of a Hamiltonian path is that all its vertices have degree at most two in the path. In a tree, we call vertices of degree at least three branch vertices. If a connected graph has no Hamiltonian path, we can still look for spanning trees that come "close," in particular by having few branch vertices (since a Hamiltonian path would have none).

 

A conjecture of Matsuda, Ozeki, and Yamashita posits that, for any positive integer k, a connected claw-free n-vertex graph G must contain either a spanning tree with at most k branch vertices or an independent set of 2k+3 vertices whose degrees add up to at most n-3. We prove this conjecture, which was known to be sharp.

Table of Contents

1 Introduction: page 1

2 Proof for k=2: page 6

2.1 Lemmas: page 8

2.2 First Structure: page 10

2.3 Second Structure: page 15

2.4 Third Structure: page 22

2.5 Fourth Structure: page 27

2.6 Fifth Structure: page 31

3 General Case: page 35

4 Future Work: page 50

Bibliography: page 51

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