English

Not every graph can be reconstructed from its boundary distance matrix

Combinatorics 2025-06-04 v1

Abstract

A vertex vv of a connected graph GG is said to be a boundary vertex of GG if for some other vertex uu of GG, no neighbor of vv is further away from uu than vv. The boundary (G)\partial(G) of GG is the set of all of its boundary vertices. The boundary distance matrix D^G\hat{D}_G of a graph G=([n],E)G=([n],E) is the square matrix of order κ\kappa, being κ\kappa the order of (G)\partial(G), such that for every i,j(G)i,j\in \partial(G), [D^G]ij=dG(i,j)[\hat{D}_G]_{ij}=d_G(i,j). In a recent paper [doi.org/10.7151/dmgt.2567], it was shown that if a graph GG is either a block graph or a unicyclic graph, then GG is uniquely determined by the boundary distance matrix D^G\hat{D}_{G} of GG, and it was also conjectured that this statement holds for every connected graph GG, whenever both the order nn and the boundary (and thus also the boundary distance matrix) of GG are prefixed. After proving that this conjecture is true for several graph families, such as being of diameter 2, having order at most n=6n=6 or being Ptolemaic, we show that this statement does not hold when considering, for example, either the family of split graphs of diameter 3 and order at least n=10n=10 or the family of distance-hereditary graphs of order at least n=8n=8.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2506.02652,
  title  = {Not every graph can be reconstructed from its boundary distance matrix},
  author = {José Cáceres and Ignacio M. Pelayo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.02652},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2404.04039

R2 v1 2026-07-01T02:56:27.118Z