English

A direct proof of well-definedness for the polymatroid Tutte polynomial

Combinatorics 2024-03-12 v1

Abstract

For a polymatroid PP over [n][n], Bernardi, K\'{a}lm\'{a}n and Postnikov [\emph{Adv. Math.} 402 (2022) 108355] introduced the polymatroid Tutte polynomial TP\mathscr{T}_{P} relying on the order 1<2<<n1<2<\cdots<n of [n][n], which generalizes the classical Tutte polynomial from matroids to polymatroids. They proved the independence of this order by the fact that TP\mathscr{T}_{P} is equivalent to another polynomial that only depends on PP. In this paper, similar to the Tutte's original proof of the well-definedness of the Tutte polynomial defined by the summation over all spanning trees using activities depending on the order of edges, we give a direct and elementary proof of the well-definedness of the polymatroid Tutte polynomial.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2403.05825,
  title  = {A direct proof of well-definedness for the polymatroid Tutte polynomial},
  author = {Xiaxia Guan and Xian'an Jin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.05825},
  year   = {2024}
}