1 research outputs found
An Abstraction of Whitney's Broken Circuit Theorem
We establish a broad generalization of Whitney's broken circuit theorem on
the chromatic polynomial of a graph to sums of type
where is a finite set and is a mapping from the power set of into
an abelian group. We give applications to the domination polynomial and the
subgraph component polynomial of a graph, the chromatic polynomial of a
hypergraph, the characteristic polynomial and Crapo's beta invariant of a
matroid, and the principle of inclusion-exclusion. Thus, we discover several
known and new results in a concise and unified way. As further applications of
our main result, we derive a new generalization of the maximums-minimums
identity and of a theorem due to Blass and Sagan on the M\"obius function of a
finite lattice, which generalizes Rota's crosscut theorem. For the classical
M\"obius function, both Euler's totient function and its Dirichlet inverse, and
the reciprocal of the Riemann zeta function we obtain new expansions involving
the greatest common divisor resp. least common multiple. We finally establish
an even broader generalization of Whitney's broken circuit theorem in the
context of convex geometries (antimatroids).Comment: 18 page