210 research outputs found
The Strong Perfect Graph Conjecture: 40 years of Attempts, and its Resolution
International audienceThe Strong Perfect Graph Conjecture (SPGC) was certainly one of the most challenging conjectures in graph theory. During more than four decades, numerous attempts were made to solve it, by combinatorial methods, by linear algebraic methods, or by polyhedral methods. The first of these three approaches yielded the first (and to date only) proof of the SPGC; the other two remain promising to consider in attempting an alternative proof. This paper is an unbalanced survey of the attempts to solve the SPGC; unbalanced, because (1) we devote a signicant part of it to the 'primitive graphs and structural faults' paradigm which led to the Strong Perfect Graph Theorem (SPGT); (2) we briefly present the other "direct" attempts, that is, the ones for which results exist showing one (possible) way to the proof; (3) we ignore entirely the "indirect" approaches whose aim was to get more information about the properties and structure of perfect graphs, without a direct impact on the SPGC. Our aim in this paper is to trace the path that led to the proof of the SPGT as completely as possible. Of course, this implies large overlaps with the recent book on perfect graphs [J.L. Ramirez-Alfonsin and B.A. Reed, eds., Perfect Graphs (Wiley & Sons, 2001).], but it also implies a deeper analysis (with additional results) and another viewpoint on the topic
On Box-Perfect Graphs
Let be a graph and let be the clique-vertex incidence matrix
of . It is well known that is perfect iff the system , is totally dual integral (TDI). In 1982,
Cameron and Edmonds proposed to call box-perfect if the system
, is box-totally dual
integral (box-TDI), and posed the problem of characterizing such graphs. In
this paper we prove the Cameron-Edmonds conjecture on box-perfectness of parity
graphs, and identify several other classes of box-perfect graphs. We also
develop a general and powerful method for establishing box-perfectness
Colouring quadrangulations of projective spaces
A graph embedded in a surface with all faces of size 4 is known as a
quadrangulation. We extend the definition of quadrangulation to higher
dimensions, and prove that any graph G which embeds as a quadrangulation in the
real projective space P^n has chromatic number n+2 or higher, unless G is
bipartite. For n=2 this was proved by Youngs [J. Graph Theory 21 (1996),
219-227]. The family of quadrangulations of projective spaces includes all
complete graphs, all Mycielski graphs, and certain graphs homomorphic to
Schrijver graphs. As a corollary, we obtain a new proof of the Lovasz-Kneser
theorem
On non-rank facets of the stable set polytope of claw-free graphs and circulant graphs
We deal with non-rank facets of the stable set polytope of claw-free graphs. We extend results of Giles and Trotter [7] by (i) showing that for any nonnegative integer a there exists a circulant graph whose stable set polytope has a facet-inducing inequality with (a,a+1)-valued coefficients (rank facets have only coefficients 0, 1), and (ii) providing new facets of the stable set polytope with up to five different non-zero coefficients for claw-free graphs. We prove that coefficients have to be consecutive in any facet with exactly two different non-zero coefficients (assuming they are relatively prime). Last but not least, we present a complete description of the stable set polytope for graphs with stability number 2, already observed by Cook [3] and Shepherd [18
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Combinatorial Optimization
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