English

The additive-multiplicative distance matrix of a graph, and a novel third invariant

Combinatorics 2023-09-19 v1

Abstract

Graham showed with Pollak and Hoffman-Hosoya that for any directed graph GG with strong blocks GeG_e, the determinant det(DG)\det(D_G) and cofactor-sum cof(DG)cof(D_G) of the distance matrix DGD_G can be computed from the same quantities for the blocks GeG_e. This was extended to trees - and in our recent work to any graph - with multiplicative and qq-distance matrices. For trees, we went further and unified all previous variants with weights in a unital commutative ring, into a distance matrix with additive and multiplicative edge-data. In this work: (1) We introduce the additive-multiplicative distance matrix DGD_G of every strongly connected graph GG, using what we term the additive-multiplicative block-datum G\mathcal{G}. This subsumes the previously studied additive, multiplicative, and qq-distances for all graphs. (2) We introduce an invariant κ(DG)\kappa(D_G) that seems novel to date, and use it to show "master" Graham-Hoffman-Hosoya (GHH) identities, which express det(DG),cof(DG)\det(D_G), cof(D_G) in terms of the blocks GeG_e. We show how these imply all previous variants. (3) We show det(.),cof(.),κ(.)\det(.), cof(.), \kappa(.) depend only on the block-data for not just DGD_G, but also several minors of DGD_G. This was not studied in any setting to date; we show it in the "most general" additive-multiplicative setting, hence in all known settings. (4) We compute DG1D_G^{-1} in closed-form; this specializes to all known variants. In particular, we recover our previous formula for DT1D_T^{-1} for additive-multiplicative trees (which itself specializes to a result of Graham-Lovasz and answers a 2006 question of Bapat-Lal-Pati.) (5) We also show that not the Laplacian, but a closely related matrix is the "correct" one to use in DG1D_G^{-1} - for the most general additive-multiplicative matrix DGD_G of each GG. As examples, we compute in closed form det(DG),cof(DG),κ(DG),DG1\det(D_G), cof(D_G), \kappa(D_G), D_G^{-1} for hypertrees.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2309.08691,
  title  = {The additive-multiplicative distance matrix of a graph, and a novel third invariant},
  author = {Projesh Nath Choudhury and Apoorva Khare},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.08691},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

27 pages, LaTeX