"Integer flows and Modulo Orientations" by Yezhou Wu

Semester

Summer

Date of Graduation

2012

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Type

PhD

College

Eberly College of Arts and Sciences

Department

Mathematics

Committee Chair

Cun-Quan Zhang.

Abstract

Tutte's 3-flow conjecture (1970's) states that every 4-edge-connected graph admits a nowhere-zero 3-flow. A graph G admits a nowhere-zero 3-flow if and only if G has an orientation such that the out-degree equals the in-degree modulo 3 for every vertex. In the 1980ies Jaeger suggested some related conjectures. The generalized conjecture to modulo k-orientations, called circular flow conjecture, says that, for every odd natural number k, every (2k-2)-edge-connected graph has an orientation such that the out-degree equals the in-degree modulo k for every vertex. And the weaker conjecture he made, known as the weak 3-flow conjecture where he suggests that the constant 4 is replaced by any larger constant.;The weak version of the circular flow conjecture and the weak 3-flow conjecture are verified by Thomassen (JCTB 2012) recently. He proved that, for every odd natural number k, every (2k 2 + k)-edge-connected graph has an orientation such that the out-degree equals the in-degree modulo k for every vertex and for k = 3 the edge-connectivity 8 suffices. Those proofs are refined in this paper to give the same conclusions for 9 k-edge-connected graphs and for 6-edge-connected graphs when k = 3 respectively.

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