Vertex-magic Labeling of Trees and Forests

Abstract

A vertex-magic total labeling of a graph G(V,E) is a one-to-one map λ from E ∪ V onto the integers {1, 2, . . . , |E| + |V|} such that λ(x) + Σ λ(xy) where the sum is over all vertices y adjacent to x, is a constant, independent of the choice of vertex x. In this paper we examine the existence of vertex-magic total labelings of trees and forests. The situation is quite different from the conjectured behavior of edge-magic total labelings of these graphs. We pay special attention to the case of so-called galaxies, forests in which every component tree is a star