English

General position polynomials

Combinatorics 2024-01-12 v1

Abstract

A subset of vertices of a graph GG is a general position set if no triple of vertices from the set lie on a common shortest path in GG. In this paper we introduce the general position polynomial as i0aixi\sum_{i \geq 0} a_i x^i, where aia_i is the number of distinct general position sets of GG with cardinality ii. The polynomial is considered for several well-known classes of graphs and graph operations. It is shown that the polynomial is not unimodal in general, not even on trees. On the other hand, several classes of graphs, including Kneser graphs K(n,2)K(n,2), with unimodal general position polynomials are presented.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2401.05696,
  title  = {General position polynomials},
  author = {Vesna Iršič and Sandi Klavžar and Gregor Rus and James Tuite},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.05696},
  year   = {2024}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T14:13:58.190Z