In 1982 Truemper gave a theorem that characterizes graphs whose edges can be labeled so that all chordless cycles have prescribed parities. The characterization states that this can be done for a graph G if and only if it can be done for all induced subgraphs of G that are of few speci c types, that we will call Truemper con gurations. Truemper was originally motivated by the problem of obtaining a co-NP characterization of bipartite graphs that are signable to be balanced (i.e. bipartite graphs whose node-node incidence matrices are balanceable matrices). The con gurations that Truemper identi ed in his theorem ended up playing a key role in understanding the structure of several seemingly diverse classes of objects, such as regular matroids, balanceable matrices and perfect graphs. In this survey we view all these classes, and more, through the excluded Truemper con gurations, focusing on the algorithmic consequences, trying to understand what structurally enables e cient recognition and optimization algorithms
