Abstract: | Mader conjectured that every k‐critical n‐connected noncomplete graph G has 2k + 2 pairwise disjoint fragments. The author in 9 proved that the conjecture holds if the order of G is greater than (k + 2)n. Now we settle this conjecture completely. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Graph Theory 45: 281–297, 2004 |