Related papers: Chordal graphs, higher independence and vertex dec…

The main focus of this thesis is a generalization of covering arrays, covering arrays on graphs. Two vectors v,w in Z_k^n are qualitatively independent if for all ordered pairs (a,b) in Z_k x Z_k there is a position i in the vectors where…

A connected graph is 2K2-free if it does not contain a pair of independent edges as an induced subgraph. In this paper, we present the structural characterization of minimal vertex separator and show that there are polynomial number of…

A biclique in a graph $G$ is a complete bipartite subgraph (not necessarily induced), and the least positive integer $k$ for which the vertex set of $G$ can be partitioned into at most $k$ bicliques is the biclique vertex partition number…

We give deterministic distributed $(1+\epsilon)$-approximation algorithms for Minimum Vertex Coloring and Maximum Independent Set on chordal graphs in the LOCAL model. Our coloring algorithm runs in $O(\frac{1}{\epsilon} \log n)$ rounds,…

A graph is chordal if every cycle of length at least four has a chord. In 1961, Dirac characterized chordal graphs as those graphs that can be built from complete graphs by repeated clique-sums. Generalizing this, we consider the class of…

For every natural number $d$, we construct finite $d$-regular simple graphs that, for every $r \le d$, contain an independent exact $r$-cover. This answers a question of Gray and Johnson that arose in their study of 2-step transit…

A graph $G$ is called well-covered if all maximal independent sets of vertices have the same cardinality. A simplicial complex $\Delta$ is called pure if all of its facets have the same cardinality. Let $\mathcal G$ be the class of graphs…

In attempting to understand how combinatorial modifications alter algebraic properties of monomial ideals, several authors have investigated the process of adding "whiskers" to graphs. In this paper, we study a similar construction to build…

We focus our attention on well-covered graphs that are vertex decomposable. We show that for many known families of these vertex decomposable graphs, the set of shedding vertices forms a dominating set. We then construct three new infinite…

Given a family $\mathcal{H}$ of graphs, we say that a graph $G$ is $\mathcal{H}$-free if no induced subgraph of $G$ is isomorphic to a member of $\mathcal{H}$. Let $S_{t,t,t}$ be the graph obtained from $K_{1,3}$ by subdividing each edge…

We study the independence complex of the lexicographic product $G[H]$ of a forest $G$ and a graph $H$. We prove that for a forest $G$ which is not dominated by a single vertex, if the independence complex of $H$ is homotopy equivalent to a…

An independent dominating set of the simple graph $G=(V,E)$ is a vertex subset that is both dominating and independent in $G$. The independent domination polynomial of a graph $G$ is the polynomial $D_i(G,x)=\sum_{A} x^{|A|}$, summed over…

Let $G$ be a graph with vertex set $V(G)$ and edge set $E(G)$. A set $I_0(G) \subseteq V(G)$ is a vertex independent set if no two vertices in $I_0(G)$ are adjacent in $G$. We study $\alpha_1(G)$, which is the maximum cardinality of a set…

Let $G$ be a graph of order $n$. For a positive integer $p$, $G$ is said to be a $\mathbf{W}_{p}$ graph if $n\geq p$ and every $p$ pairwise disjoint independent sets of $G$ are contained within $p$ pairwise disjoint maximum independent…

Let ${\rm ind}(G)$ be the number of independent sets in a graph $G$. We show that if $G$ has maximum degree at most $5$ then $$ {\rm ind}(G) \leq 2^{{\rm iso}(G)} \prod_{uv \in E(G)} {\rm ind}(K_{d(u),d(v)})^{\frac{1}{d(u)d(v)}} $$ (where…

For any finite set $\mathcal{H} = \{H_1,\ldots,H_p\}$ of graphs, a graph is $\mathcal{H}$-subgraph-free if it does not contain any of $H_1,\ldots,H_p$ as a subgraph. In recent work, meta-classifications have been studied: these show that if…

If for any $k$ the $k$-th coefficient of a polynomial $I(G;x)$ is equal to the number of stable sets of cardinality $k$ in the graph $G$, then it is called the independence polynomial of $G$ (Gutman and Harary, 1983). Alavi, Malde, Schwenk…

A connected undirected graph $G = (V,E)$ is lower conformally rigid if uniform edge weights maximize the second smallest Laplacian eigenvalue $\lambda_2(w)$ over all normalized edge weights $w$, and upper conformally rigid if uniform edge…

We show that all the tangles in a finite graph or matroid can be distinguished by a single tree-decomposition that is invariant under the automorphisms of the graph or matroid. This comes as a corollary of a similar decomposition theorem…

Let $G$ be a group. The power graph of $G$ is a graph with vertex set $G$ in which two distinct elements $x,y$ are adjacent if one of them is a power of the other. We characterize all groups whose power graphs have finite independence…