A new conjecture on the inertia of graphs
Combinatorics
2025-12-23 v3
Abstract
Let be a graph with adjacency matrix . We conjecture that where and denote the number of positive and negative eigenvalues of , respectively. This conjecture generalizes to all graphs the well-known absolute bound for strongly regular graphs. The conjecture also relates to a question posed by Torga\v{s}ev. We prove the conjecture for special graph families, including line graphs and planar graphs, and provide examples where the conjecture is exact. We also conjecture that for any connected graph , its line graph satisfies , and obtain partial results.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2508.01163,
title = {A new conjecture on the inertia of graphs},
author = {Saieed Akbari and Clive Elphick and Hitesh Kumar and Shivaramakrishna Pragada and Quanyu Tang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.01163},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
Minor revisions and title changed