ArticleOriginal scientific text
Title
Distance defined by spanning trees in graphs
Authors 1, 2, 1
Affiliations
- Department of Mathematics, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI 49008, USA
- Faculty of Philosophy & Arts, Charles University, Prague, J. Palacha 2, CZ - 116 38 Praha 1, Czech Republic
Abstract
For a spanning tree T in a nontrivial connected graph G and for vertices u and v in G, there exists a unique u-v path u = u₀, u₁, u₂,..., uₖ = v in T. A u-v T-path in G is a u- v path u = v₀, v₁,...,vₗ = v in G that is a subsequence of the sequence u = u₀, u₁, u₂,..., uₖ = v. A u-v T-path of minimum length is a u-v T-geodesic in G. The T-distance from u to v in G is the length of a u-v T-geodesic. Let geo(G) and geo(G|T) be the set of geodesics and the set of T-geodesics respectively in G. Necessary and sufficient conditions are established for (1) geo(G) = geo(G|T) and (2) geo(G|T) = geo(G|T*), where T and T* are two spanning trees of G. It is shown for a connected graph G that geo(G|T) = geo(G) for every spanning tree T of G if and only if G is a block graph. For a spanning tree T of a connected graph G, it is also shown that geo(G|T) satisfies seven of the eight axioms of the characterization of geo(G). Furthermore, we study the relationship between the distance d and T-distance in graphs and present several realization results on parameters and subgraphs defined by these two distances.
Keywords
distance, geodesic, T-path, T-geodesic, T-distance
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