Spanning trees without adjacent vertices of degree 2

Albertson, Berman, Hutchinson, and Thomassen showed in 1990 that there exist highly connected graphs in which every spanning tree contains vertices of degree 2. Using a result of Alon and Wormald, we show that there exists a natural number $d$ such that every graph of minimum degree at least $d$ contains a spanning tree without adjacent vertices of degree 2. Moreover, we prove that every graph with minimum degree at least 3 has a spanning tree without three consecutive vertices of degree 2

Spanning Halin Subgraphs Involving Forbidden Subgraphs

In structural graph theory, connectivity is an important notation with a lot of applications. Tutte, in 1961, showed that a simple graph is 3-connected if and only if it can be generated from a wheel graph by repeatedly adding edges between nonadjacent vertices and applying vertex splitting. In 1971, Halin constructed a class of edge-minimal 3-connected planar graphs, which are a generalization of wheel graphs and later were named “Halin graphs” by Lovasz and Plummer. A Halin graph is obtained from a plane embedding of a tree with no stems having degree 2 by adding a cycle through its leaves in the natural order determined according to the embedding. Since Halin graphs were introduced, many useful properties, such as Hamiltonian, hamiltonian-connected and pancyclic, have been discovered. Hence, it will reveal many properties of a graph if we know the graph contains a spanning Halin subgraph. But unfortunately, until now, there is no positive result showing under which conditions a graph contains a spanning Halin subgraph. In this thesis, we characterize all forbidden pairs implying graphs containing spanning Halin subgraphs. Consequently, we provide a complete proof conjecture of Chen et al. Our proofs are based on Chudnovsky and Seymour’s decomposition theorem of claw-free graphs, which were published recently in a series of papers

Minimal and Evolving Networks

This thesis is devoted to the study of minimal networks from both the static and the dynamic point of view and in particular we consider problems at the interface of geometry and analysis. In the first chapter we search for networks embedded in a given Riemannian surface with minimal length that satisfy some topological constraints, namely that one of being spines of the surface. Using standard techniques of the calculus of variation, we prove that such minimal networks exist for any closed Riemannian surfaces and then we focus on special cases (flat torus, hyperbolic surfaces) to obtain more information about their classification. In the second chapter we let the networks evolve according to the ``gradient flow" of the length. Intuitively this means that the curves which form the network evolves with normal velocity equal to the curvature. We consider solution in strong sense and in particular we discuss the short time existence and the singularity formation at the maximal time of existence, generalizing some results for the curve shortening flow of simple closed curves

Singularities, Supersymmetry and Combinatorial Reciprocity

This work illustrates a method to investigate certain smooth, codimension-two, real submanifolds of spheres of arbitrary odd dimension (with complements that fiber over the circle) using a novel supersymmetric quantum invariant. Algebraic (fibered) links, including Brieskorn-Pham homology spheres with exotic differentiable structure, are examples of said manifolds with a relative diffeomorphism-type that is determined by the corresponding (multivariate) Alexander polynomial.Engineering and Applied Science