Ring graphs and complete intersection toric ideals

We study the family of graphs whose number of primitive cycles equals its cycle rank. It is shown that this family is precisely the family of ring graphs. Then we study the complete intersection property of toric ideals of bipartite graphs and oriented graphs. An interesting application is that complete intersection toric ideals of bipartite graphs correspond to ring graphs and that these ideals are minimally generated by Gröbner bases. We prove that any graph can be oriented such that its toric ideal is a complete intersection with a universal Gröbner basis determined by the cycles. It turns out that bipartite ring graphs are exactly the bipartite graphs that have complete intersection toric ideals for any orientation.     

Some remarks on the geodetic number of a graph

A set of vertices D of a graph G is geodetic if every vertex of G lies on a shortest path between two not necessarily distinct vertices in D. The geodetic number of G is the minimum cardinality of a geodetic set of G.We prove that it is NP-complete to decide for a given chordal or chordal bipartite graph G and a given integer k whether G has a geodetic set of cardinality at most k. Furthermore, we prove an upper bound on the geodetic number of graphs without short cycles and study the geodetic number of cographs, split graphs, and unit interval graphs.     

A note on certain de Bruijn sequences with forbidden subsequences

We consider words over a finite alphabet with certain uniqueness properties (a subsequence of length k does not occur more than once) and distance properties (at least j other symbols separate the occurrence of the same symbol). The maximal length of these words is realised by linear de Bruijn sequences with certain forbidden subsequences. We prove the existence of these maximal sequences.     

On wreathed lexicographic products of graphs

This paper proves a necessary and sufficient condition for the endomorphism monoid of a lexicographic product G[H] of graphs G,H to be the wreath product of the monoids and . The paper also gives respective necessary and sufficient conditions for specialized cases such as for unretractive or triangle-free graphs G.     

Sums and differences along Hamiltonian cycles

Given a finite abelian group G, consider the complete graph on the set of all elements of G. Find a Hamiltonian cycle in this graph and for each pair of consecutive vertices along the cycle compute their sum. What are the smallest and the largest possible number of distinct sums that can emerge in this way? What is the expected number of distinct sums if the cycle is chosen randomly? How do the answers change if an orientation is given to the cycle and differences (instead of sums) are computed? We give complete solutions to some of these problems and establish reasonably sharp estimates for the rest.     

Optimal 1-planar graphs which triangulate other surfaces

We show that, for any given non-spherical orientable closed surface F², there exists an optimal 1-planar graph which can be embedded on F² as a triangulation. On the other hand, we prove that there does not exist any such graph for the nonorientable closed surfaces of genus at most 3.     

A simple proof of the spectral excess theorem for distance-regular graphs

The spectral excess theorem provides a quasi-spectral characterization for a (regular) graph Γ with d+1 distinct eigenvalues to be distance-regular graph, in terms of the excess (number of vertices at distance d) of each of its vertices. The original approach, due to Fiol and Garriga in 1997, was obtained by using a local approach, so giving a characterization of the so-called pseudo-distance-regularity around a vertex. In this paper we present a new simple projection method based in a global point of view, and where the mean excess plays an essential role.     

Proof of a conjecture on fractional Ramsey numbers

Jacobson, Levin, and Scheinerman introduced the fractional Ramsey function r_f (a₁, a₂, …, a_k) as an extension of the classical definition for Ramsey numbers. They determined an exact formula for the fractional Ramsey function for the case k=2. In this article, we answer an open problem by determining an explicit formula for the general case k>2 by constructing an infinite family of circulant graphs for which the independence numbers can be computed explicitly. This construction gives us two further results: a new (infinite) family of star extremal graphs which are a superset of many of the families currently known in the literature, and a broad generalization of known results on the chromatic number of integer distance graphs. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Graph Theory 63: 164–178, 2010