English

Maximum Nullity and Forcing Number on Graphs with Maximum Degree at most Three

Combinatorics 2019-03-21 v1

Abstract

A dynamic coloring of the vertices of a graph GG starts with an initial subset FF of colored vertices, with all remaining vertices being non-colored. At each time step, a colored vertex with exactly one non-colored neighbor forces this non-colored neighbor to be colored. The initial set FF is called a forcing set of GG if, by iteratively applying the forcing process, every vertex in GG becomes colored. The forcing number of a graph GG, denoted by F(G)F(G), is the cardinality of a minimum forcing set of GG. The maximum nullity of GG, denoted by M(G)M(G), is defined to be the largest possible nullity over all real symmetric matrices AA whose aij0a_{ij} \neq 0 for iji \neq j, whenever two vertices uiu_{i} and uju_{j} of GG are adjacent. In this paper, we characterize all graphs GG of order nn, maximum degree at most three, and F(G)=3F(G)=3. Also we classify these graphs with their maximum nullity.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1903.08614,
  title  = {Maximum Nullity and Forcing Number on Graphs with Maximum Degree at most Three},
  author = {Meysam Alishahi and Elahe Rezaei-Sani and Elahe Sharifi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.08614},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

13 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-23T08:14:10.574Z