152,350 research outputs found
Branch-depth: Generalizing tree-depth of graphs
We present a concept called the branch-depth of a connectivity function, that
generalizes the tree-depth of graphs. Then we prove two theorems showing that
this concept aligns closely with the notions of tree-depth and shrub-depth of
graphs as follows. For a graph and a subset of we let
be the number of vertices incident with an edge in and an
edge in . For a subset of , let be the rank
of the adjacency matrix between and over the binary field.
We prove that a class of graphs has bounded tree-depth if and only if the
corresponding class of functions has bounded branch-depth and
similarly a class of graphs has bounded shrub-depth if and only if the
corresponding class of functions has bounded branch-depth, which we
call the rank-depth of graphs.
Furthermore we investigate various potential generalizations of tree-depth to
matroids and prove that matroids representable over a fixed finite field having
no large circuits are well-quasi-ordered by the restriction.Comment: 34 pages, 2 figure
On cubic bridgeless graphs whose edge-set cannot be covered by four perfect matchings
The problem of establishing the number of perfect matchings necessary to
cover the edge-set of a cubic bridgeless graph is strictly related to a famous
conjecture of Berge and Fulkerson. In this paper we prove that deciding whether
this number is at most 4 for a given cubic bridgeless graph is NP-complete. We
also construct an infinite family of snarks (cyclically
4-edge-connected cubic graphs of girth at least five and chromatic index four)
whose edge-set cannot be covered by 4 perfect matchings. Only two such graphs
were known. It turns out that the family also has interesting
properties with respect to the shortest cycle cover problem. The shortest cycle
cover of any cubic bridgeless graph with edges has length at least
, and we show that this inequality is strict for graphs of .
We also construct the first known snark with no cycle cover of length less than
.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figure
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