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Quasiperiods of Magic Labeling Quasipolynomials

Combinatorics 2024-03-08 v1

Abstract

A magic labeling of a graph is a labeling of the edges by nonnegative integers such that the label sum over the edges incident to every vertex is the same. This common label sum is known as the index. We count magic labelings by maximum edge label, rather than index, using an Ehrhart-theoretic approach. In contrast to Stanley's 1973 work showing that the function counting magic labelings with bounded index is a quasipolynomial with quasiperiod 22, we show by construction that the minimum quasiperiod of the quasipolynomial counting magic labelings with bounded maximum label can be arbitrarily large, even for planar bipartite graphs. Unfortunately, this rules out a certain Ehrhart-theoretic approach to proving Hartsfield and Ringel's Antimagic Graph Conjecture. However, we show that this quasipolynomial is in fact a polynomial for any bipartite graph with matching preclusion number at most 11, which includes any bipartite graph with a leaf.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2403.04129,
  title  = {Quasiperiods of Magic Labeling Quasipolynomials},
  author = {Margaret Bayer and Amanda Burcroff and Tyrrell B. McAllister and Leilani Pai},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.04129},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

16 pages, 3 figures