On the Core of a Unicyclic Graph

A set S is independent in a graph G if no two vertices from S are adjacent. By core(G) we mean the intersection of all maximum independent sets. The independence number alpha(G) is the cardinality of a maximum independent set, while mu(G) is the size of a maximum matching in G. A connected graph having only one cycle, say C, is a unicyclic graph. In this paper we prove that if G is a unicyclic graph of order n and n-1 = alpha(G) + mu(G), then core(G) coincides with the union of cores of all trees in G-C.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure

Computing Unique Maximum Matchings in O(m) time for Konig-Egervary Graphs and Unicyclic Graphs

Let alpha(G) denote the maximum size of an independent set of vertices and mu(G) be the cardinality of a maximum matching in a graph G. A matching saturating all the vertices is perfect. If alpha(G) + mu(G) equals the number of vertices of G, then it is called a Konig-Egervary graph. A graph is unicyclic if it has a unique cycle. In 2010, Bartha conjectured that a unique perfect matching, if it exists, can be found in O(m) time, where m is the number of edges. In this paper we validate this conjecture for Konig-Egervary graphs and unicylic graphs. We propose a variation of Karp-Sipser leaf-removal algorithm (Karp and Spiser, 1981), which ends with an empty graph if and only if the original graph is a Konig-Egervary graph with a unique perfect matching obtained as an output as well. We also show that a unicyclic non-bipartite graph G may have at most one perfect matching, and this is the case where G is a Konig-Egervary graph.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure

Eccentric connectivity index

The eccentric connectivity index $\xi^c$ is a novel distance--based molecular structure descriptor that was recently used for mathematical modeling of biological activities of diverse nature. It is defined as $\xi^c (G) = \sum_{v \in V (G)} deg (v) \cdot \epsilon (v)$\,, where $deg (v)$ and $\epsilon (v)$ denote the vertex degree and eccentricity of $v$\,, respectively. We survey some mathematical properties of this index and furthermore support the use of eccentric connectivity index as topological structure descriptor. We present the extremal trees and unicyclic graphs with maximum and minimum eccentric connectivity index subject to the certain graph constraints. Sharp lower and asymptotic upper bound for all graphs are given and various connections with other important graph invariants are established. In addition, we present explicit formulae for the values of eccentric connectivity index for several families of composite graphs and designed a linear algorithm for calculating the eccentric connectivity index of trees. Some open problems and related indices for further study are also listed.Comment: 25 pages, 5 figure

On the strong partition dimension of graphs

We present a different way to obtain generators of metric spaces having the property that the ``position'' of every element of the space is uniquely determined by the distances from the elements of the generators. Specifically we introduce a generator based on a partition of the metric space into sets of elements. The sets of the partition will work as the new elements which will uniquely determine the position of each single element of the space. A set $W$ of vertices of a connected graph $G$ strongly resolves two different vertices $x,y\notin W$ if either $d_G(x,W)=d_G(x,y)+d_G(y,W)$ or $d_G(y,W)=d_G(y,x)+d_G(x,W)$, where $d_G(x,W)=\min\left\{d(x,w)\;:\;w\in W\right\}$. An ordered vertex partition $\Pi=\left\{U_1,U_2,...,U_k\right\}$ of a graph $G$ is a strong resolving partition for $G$ if every two different vertices of $G$ belonging to the same set of the partition are strongly resolved by some set of $\Pi$. A strong resolving partition of minimum cardinality is called a strong partition basis and its cardinality the strong partition dimension. In this article we introduce the concepts of strong resolving partition and strong partition dimension and we begin with the study of its mathematical properties. We give some realizability results for this parameter and we also obtain tight bounds and closed formulae for the strong metric dimension of several graphs.Comment: 16 page