In mathematics, graph theory is the study of graphs, which are mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects. A graph in this context is made up of vertices which are connected by edges. A distinction is made between undirected graphs, where edges link two vertices symmetrically, and directed graphs, where edges link two vertices asymmetrically. Graphs are one of the principal objects of study in discrete mathematics.
In graph theory and computer science, an adjacency matrix is a square matrix used to represent a finite graph. The elements of the matrix indicate whether pairs of vertices are adjacent or not in the graph.
This is a glossary of graph theory. Graph theory is the study of graphs, systems of nodes or vertices connected in pairs by lines or edges.
In discrete mathematics, and more specifically in graph theory, a graph is a structure amounting to a set of objects in which some pairs of the objects are in some sense "related". The objects correspond to mathematical abstractions called vertices and each of the related pairs of vertices is called an edge. Typically, a graph is depicted in diagrammatic form as a set of dots or circles for the vertices, joined by lines or curves for the edges. Graphs are one of the objects of study in discrete mathematics.
In graph theory, two graphs and are homeomorphic if there is a graph isomorphism from some subdivision of to some subdivision of . If the edges of a graph are thought of as lines drawn from one vertex to another, then two graphs are homeomorphic to each other in the graph-theoretic sense precisely if they are homeomorphic in the topological sense.
In mathematics, an incidence matrix is a logical matrix that shows the relationship between two classes of objects, usually called an incidence relation. If the first class is X and the second is Y, the matrix has one row for each element of X and one column for each element of Y. The entry in row x and column y is 1 if x and y are related and 0 if they are not. There are variations; see below.
In the mathematical field of graph theory, a spanning treeT of an undirected graph G is a subgraph that is a tree which includes all of the vertices of G. In general, a graph may have several spanning trees, but a graph that is not connected will not contain a spanning tree. If all of the edges of G are also edges of a spanning tree T of G, then G is a tree and is identical to T.
In graph theory, a proper edge coloring of a graph is an assignment of "colors" to the edges of the graph so that no two incident edges have the same color. For example, the figure to the right shows an edge coloring of a graph by the colors red, blue, and green. Edge colorings are one of several different types of graph coloring. The edge-coloring problem asks whether it is possible to color the edges of a given graph using at most k different colors, for a given value of k, or with the fewest possible colors. The minimum required number of colors for the edges of a given graph is called the chromatic index of the graph. For example, the edges of the graph in the illustration can be colored by three colors but cannot be colored by two colors, so the graph shown has chromatic index three.
In the mathematical field of graph theory, the complement or inverse of a graph G is a graph H on the same vertices such that two distinct vertices of H are adjacent if and only if they are not adjacent in G. That is, to generate the complement of a graph, one fills in all the missing edges required to form a complete graph, and removes all the edges that were previously there.
In the mathematical field of graph theory, a graph G is symmetric if, given any two pairs of adjacent vertices u1—v1 and u2—v2 of G, there is an automorphism
In the mathematical discipline of graph theory, a graph labeling is the assignment of labels, traditionally represented by integers, to edges and/or vertices of a graph.
In mathematics and computer science, connectivity is one of the basic concepts of graph theory: it asks for the minimum number of elements that need to be removed to separate the remaining nodes into two or more isolated subgraphs. It is closely related to the theory of network flow problems. The connectivity of a graph is an important measure of its resilience as a network.
In mathematics, and more specifically in graph theory, a multigraph is a graph which is permitted to have multiple edges, that is, edges that have the same end nodes. Thus two vertices may be connected by more than one edge.
In the mathematical discipline of graph theory, the dual graph of a planar graph G is a graph that has a vertex for each face of G. The dual graph has an edge for each pair of faces in G that are separated from each other by an edge, and a self-loop when the same face appears on both sides of an edge. Thus, each edge e of G has a corresponding dual edge, whose endpoints are the dual vertices corresponding to the faces on either side of e. The definition of the dual depends on the choice of embedding of the graph G, so it is a property of plane graphs rather than planar graphs. For planar graphs generally, there may be multiple dual graphs, depending on the choice of planar embedding of the graph.
In graph theory, an edge contraction is an operation that removes an edge from a graph while simultaneously merging the two vertices that it previously joined. Edge contraction is a fundamental operation in the theory of graph minors. Vertex identification is a less restrictive form of this operation.
In graph theory, multiple edges, are, in an undirected graph, two or more edges that are incident to the same two vertices, or in a directed graph, two or more edges with both the same tail vertex and the same head vertex. A simple graph has no multiple edges and no loops.
In graph theory, a dipole graph, dipole, bond graph, or linkage, is a multigraph consisting of two vertices connected with a number of parallel edges. A dipole graph containing n edges is called the order-n dipole graph, and is denoted by Dn. The order-n dipole graph is dual to the cycle graph Cn.
In mathematics, and more specifically in graph theory, a directed graph is a graph that is made up of a set of vertices connected by directed edges, often called arcs.
In the mathematical field of graph theory, a half-transitive graph is a graph that is both vertex-transitive and edge-transitive, but not symmetric. In other words, a graph is half-transitive if its automorphism group acts transitively upon both its vertices and its edges, but not on ordered pairs of linked vertices.
In graph theory, the Holt graph or Doyle graph is the smallest half-transitive graph, that is, the smallest example of a vertex-transitive and edge-transitive graph which is not also symmetric. Such graphs are not common. It is named after Peter G. Doyle and Derek F. Holt, who discovered the same graph independently in 1976 and 1981 respectively.
