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We investigate extremal graphs related to the game of Cops and Robbers. We focus on graphs where a single cop can catch the robber; such graphs are called cop-win. The capture time of a cop-win graph is the minimum number of moves the cop…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2019-03-21 David Offner , Kerry Ojakian

Let $F(G)$ be the number of forests of a graph $G$. Similarly let $C(G)$ be the number of connected spanning subgraphs of a connected graph $G$. We bound $F(G)$ and $C(G)$ for regular graphs and for graphs with fixed average degree. Among…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2021-08-03 Márton Borbényi , Péter Csikvári , Haoran Luo

We study a two-person game played on graphs based on the widely studied chip-firing game. Players Max and Min alternately place chips on the vertices of a graph. When a vertex accumulates as many chips as its degree, it fires, sending one…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2013-05-09 A. Bonato , W. Kinnersley , P. Pralat

(abstract shortened to meet arxiv's length requirements) We investigate two variants of the classical Cops and robber game in graphs, recently introduced by Lee, Mart\'inez-Pedroza, and Rodr\'iguez-Quinche. The two versions are played in…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-02-24 Louis Esperet , Harmender Gahlawat , Ugo Giocanti

For a graph $G$, let $t(G)$ denote the maximum number of vertices in an induced subgraph of $G$ that is a tree. Further, for a vertex $v\in V(G)$, let $t^v(G)$ denote the maximum number of vertices in an induced subgraph of $G$ that is a…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2008-12-15 Florian Pfender

In the problem of minimum connected dominating set with routing cost constraint, we are given a graph $G=(V,E)$, and the goal is to find the smallest connected dominating set $D$ of $G$ such that, for any two non-adjacent vertices $u$ and…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2018-02-20 Tung-Wei Kuo

Zero forcing is a process on graphs in which a color change rule is used to force vertices to become blue. The amount of time taken for all vertices in the graph to become blue is the propagation time. Throttling minimizes the sum of the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-05-07 Emily Cairncross , Joshua Carlson , Peter Hollander , Benjamin Kitchen , Emily Lopez , Ashley Zhuang

We study a variant of the classical cop-robber game played on compact metric graphs, where each edge is assigned a positive length and identified with a real interval of corresponding length. In this setting, both the cop and the robber…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-12-23 Daniel Berend , Michael D. Boshernitzan

We show that the cop number of directed and undirected Cayley graphs on abelian groups has an upper bound of the form of $O(\sqrt{n})$, where $n$ is the number of vertices, by introducing a refined inductive method. With our method, we…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-10-29 Peter Bradshaw , Seyyed Aliasghar Hosseini , Jérémie Turcotte

We study a natural problem in graph sparsification, the Spanning Tree Congestion (\STC) problem. Informally, the \STC problem seeks a spanning tree with no tree-edge \emph{routing} too many of the original edges. The root of this problem…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2018-04-26 L. Sunil Chandran , Yun Kuen Cheung , Davis Issac

A graph $G$ is contractible to a graph $H$ if there is a set $X \subseteq E(G)$, such that $G/X$ is isomorphic to $H$. Here, $G/X$ is the graph obtained from $G$ by contracting all the edges in $X$. For a family of graphs $\cal F$, the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Akanksha Agrawal , Fedor V. Fomin , Daniel Lokshtanov , Saket Saurabh , Prafullkumar Tale

We study the knapsack problem with graph theoretic constraints. That is, we assume that there exists a graph structure on the set of items of knapsack and the solution also needs to satisfy certain graph theoretic properties on top of…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-01-25 Palash Dey , Sudeshna Kolay , Sipra Singh

We consider a game in which a cop searches for a moving robber on a graph using distance probes, studied by Carragher, Choi, Delcourt, Erickson and West, which is a slight variation on one introduced by Seager. Carragher, Choi, Delcourt,…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2020-08-12 John Haslegrave , Richard A. B. Johnson , Sebastian Koch

The cage problem concerns finding $(k,g)$-graphs, which are $k$-regular graphs with girth $g$, of the smallest possible number of vertices. The central goal is to determine $n(k,g)$, the minimum order of such a graph, and to identify…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-11-11 Geoffrey Exoo , Jan Goedgebeur , Jorik Jooken , Louis Stubbe , Tibo Van den Eede

Cops and robbers is a pursuit-evasion game played on graphs. We completely classify the cop numbers for $n \times n$ knight graphs and queen graphs. This completes the classification of the cop numbers for all $n \times n$ classical chess…

We study the Minimum Crossing Number problem: given an $n$-vertex graph $G$, the goal is to find a drawing of $G$ in the plane with minimum number of edge crossings. This is one of the central problems in topological graph theory, that has…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2010-12-02 Julia Chuzhoy

The zero forcing number and the positive zero forcing number of a graph are two graph parameters that arise from two types of graph colourings. The zero forcing number is an upper bound on the minimum number of induced paths in the graph,…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2013-11-28 Fatemeh Alinaghipour Taklimi , Shaun Fallat , Karen Meagher

We consider a variation of cop vs.\ robber on graph in which the robber is not restricted by the graph edges; instead, he picks a time-independent probability distribution on $V(G)$ and moves according to this fixed distribution. The cop…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2013-08-23 Natasha Komarov , Peter Winkler

Let $k \geq 3$. We prove the following three bounds for the matching number, $\alpha'(G)$, of a graph, $G$, of order $n$ size $m$ and maximum degree at most $k$. If $k$ is odd, then $\alpha'(G) \ge \left( \frac{k-1}{k(k^2 - 3)} \right) n \,…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2016-04-19 Michael A. Henning , Anders Yeo

The number of spanning trees of a graph $G$, denoted $\tau(G)$, is a well studied graph parameter with numerous connections to other areas of mathematics. In a recent remarkable paper, answering a question of Sedl\'a\v{c}ek from 1969, Chan,…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-08-26 Noga Alon , Matija Bucić , Lior Gishboliner