586 research outputs found
Matchings, coverings, and Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity
We show that the co-chordal cover number of a graph G gives an upper bound
for the Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity of the associated edge ideal. Several
known combinatorial upper bounds of regularity for edge ideals are then easy
consequences of covering results from graph theory, and we derive new upper
bounds by looking at additional covering results.Comment: 12 pages; v4 has minor changes for publicatio
Partitions and Coverings of Trees by Bounded-Degree Subtrees
This paper addresses the following questions for a given tree and integer
: (1) What is the minimum number of degree- subtrees that partition
? (2) What is the minimum number of degree- subtrees that cover
? We answer the first question by providing an explicit formula for the
minimum number of subtrees, and we describe a linear time algorithm that finds
the corresponding partition. For the second question, we present a polynomial
time algorithm that computes a minimum covering. We then establish a tight
bound on the number of subtrees in coverings of trees with given maximum degree
and pathwidth. Our results show that pathwidth is the right parameter to
consider when studying coverings of trees by degree-3 subtrees. We briefly
consider coverings of general graphs by connected subgraphs of bounded degree
Covering line graphs with equivalence relations
An equivalence graph is a disjoint union of cliques, and the equivalence
number of a graph is the minimum number of equivalence
subgraphs needed to cover the edges of . We consider the equivalence number
of a line graph, giving improved upper and lower bounds: . This disproves a
recent conjecture that is at most three for triangle-free
; indeed it can be arbitrarily large.
To bound we bound the closely-related invariant
, which is the minimum number of orientations of such that for
any two edges incident to some vertex , both and are oriented
out of in some orientation. When is triangle-free,
. We prove that even when is triangle-free, it
is NP-complete to decide whether or not .Comment: 10 pages, submitted in July 200
Vertex covering with monochromatic pieces of few colours
In 1995, Erd\H{o}s and Gy\'arf\'as proved that in every -colouring of the
edges of , there is a vertex cover by monochromatic paths of
the same colour, which is optimal up to a constant factor. The main goal of
this paper is to study the natural multi-colour generalization of this problem:
given two positive integers , what is the smallest number
such that in every colouring of the edges of with
colours, there exists a vertex cover of by
monochromatic paths using altogether at most different colours? For fixed
integers and as , we prove that , where is the chromatic number of
the Kneser gr aph . More generally, if one replaces by
an arbitrary -vertex graph with fixed independence number , then we
have , where this time around is the
chromatic number of the Kneser hypergraph . This
result is tight in the sense that there exist graphs with independence number
for which . This is in sharp
contrast to the case , where it follows from a result of S\'ark\"ozy
(2012) that depends only on and , but not on
the number of vertices. We obtain similar results for the situation where
instead of using paths, one wants to cover a graph with bounded independence
number by monochromatic cycles, or a complete graph by monochromatic
-regular graphs
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