English

A generalization of Kuo condensation

Combinatorics 2014-04-22 v1

Abstract

Kuo introduced his 4-point condensation in 2003 for bipartite planar graphs. In 2006 Kuo generalized this 4-point condensation to planar graphs that are not necessarily bipartite. His formula expressed the product between the number of perfect matching of the original graph GG and that of the subgraph obtained from GG by removing the four distinguished vertices as a Pfaffian of order 4, whose entries are numbers of perfect matchings of subgraphs of GG obtained by removing various pairs of vertices chosen from among the four distinguished ones. The compelling elegance of this formula is inviting of generalization. Kuo generalized it to 2k2k points under the special assumption that the subgraph obtained by removing some subset of the 2k2k vertices has precisely one perfect matching. In this paper we prove that the formula holds in the general case. We also present a couple of applications.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1404.5003,
  title  = {A generalization of Kuo condensation},
  author = {Mihai Ciucu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1404.5003},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

22 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-22T03:54:19.237Z