On Pairwise Graph Connectivity

A graph on at least k+1 vertices is said to have global connectivity k if any two of its vertices are connected by k independent paths. The local connectivity of two vertices is the number of independent paths between those specific vertices. This dissertation is concerned with pairwise connectivity notions, meaning that the focus is on local connectivity relations that are required for a number of or all pairs of vertices. We give a detailed overview about how uniformly k-connected and uniformly k-edge-connected graphs are related and provide a complete constructive characterization of uniformly 3-connected graphs, complementing classical characterizations by Tutte. Besides a tight bound on the number of vertices of degree three in uniformly 3-connected graphs, we give results on how the crossing number and treewidth behaves under the constructions at hand. The second central concern is to introduce and study cut sequences of graphs. Such a sequence is the multiset of edge weights of a corresponding Gomory-Hu tree. The main result in that context is a constructive scheme that allows to generate graphs with prescribed cut sequence if that sequence satisfies a shifted variant of the classical Erdős-Gallai inequalities. A complete characterization of realizable cut sequences remains open. The third central goal is to investigate the spectral properties of matrices whose entries represent a graph's local connectivities. We explore how the spectral parameters of these matrices are related to the structure of the corresponding graphs, prove bounds on eigenvalues and related energies, which are sums of absolute values of all eigenvalues, and determine the attaining graphs. Furthermore, we show how these results translate to ultrametric distance matrices and touch on a Laplace analogue for connectivity matrices and a related isoperimetric inequality

Proceedings of the 8th Cologne-Twente Workshop on Graphs and Combinatorial Optimization

International audienceThe Cologne-Twente Workshop (CTW) on Graphs and Combinatorial Optimization started off as a series of workshops organized bi-annually by either Köln University or Twente University. As its importance grew over time, it re-centered its geographical focus by including northern Italy (CTW04 in Menaggio, on the lake Como and CTW08 in Gargnano, on the Garda lake). This year, CTW (in its eighth edition) will be staged in France for the first time: more precisely in the heart of Paris, at the Conservatoire National d’Arts et Métiers (CNAM), between 2nd and 4th June 2009, by a mixed organizing committee with members from LIX, Ecole Polytechnique and CEDRIC, CNAM