English

Counting spanning trees in a complete bipartite graph which contain a given spanning forest

Combinatorics 2022-03-04 v2

Abstract

In this article, we extend Moon's classic formula for counting spanning trees in complete graphs containing a fixed spanning forest to complete bipartite graphs. Let (X,Y)(X,Y) be the bipartition of the complete bipartite graph Km,nK_{m,n} with X=m|X|=m and Y=n|Y|=n. We prove that for any given spanning forest FF of Km,nK_{m,n} with components T1,T2,,TkT_1,T_2,\ldots,T_k, the number of spanning trees in Km,nK_{m,n} which contain all edges in FF is equal to 1mn(i=1k(min+nim))(1i=1kminimin+nim), \frac 1{mn}\left(\prod_{i=1}^k (m_in+n_im)\right) \left (1-\sum_{i=1}^{k}\frac{m_in_i}{m_in+n_im}\right ), where mi=V(Ti)Xm_i=|V(T_i)\cap X| and ni=V(Ti)Yn_i=|V(T_i)\cap Y| for i=1,2,,ki=1,2,\ldots,k.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2103.05294,
  title  = {Counting spanning trees in a complete bipartite graph which contain a given spanning forest},
  author = {Fengming Dong and Jun Ge},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.05294},
  year   = {2022}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T23:54:38.110Z