English

The Square of Adjacency Matrices

Combinatorics 2012-07-16 v1

Abstract

It can be shown that any symmetric (0,1)(0,1)-matrix AA with \trA=0\tr A = 0 can be interpreted as the adjacency matrix of a simple, finite graph. The square of an adjacency matrix A2=(sij)A^2=(s_{ij}) has the property that sijs_{ij} represents the number of walks of length two from vertex ii to vertex jj. With this information, the motivating question behind this paper was to determine what conditions on a matrix SS are needed to have S=A(G)2S=A(G)^2 for some graph GG. Structural results imposed by the matrix SS include detecting bipartiteness or connectedness and counting four cycles. Row and column sums are examined as well as the problem of multiple nonisomorphic graphs with the same adjacency matrix squared.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1207.3122,
  title  = {The Square of Adjacency Matrices},
  author = {Dan Kranda},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1207.3122},
  year   = {2012}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-21T21:34:56.402Z