"Spanning Trails and Spanning Trees" by Meng Zhang

Author

Meng Zhang

Date of Graduation

2015

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Type

PhD

College

Eberly College of Arts and Sciences

Department

Mathematics

Committee Chair

Hong-Jian Lai

Committee Co-Chair

John Goldwasser

Committee Member

Rong Luo

Committee Member

Mingquan Zhan

Committee Member

Cun-Quan Zhang

Abstract

There are two major parts in my dissertation. One is based on spanning trail, the other one is comparing spanning tree packing and covering.;The results of the spanning trail in my dissertation are motivated by Thomassen's Conjecture that every 4-connected line graph is hamiltonian. Harary and Nash-Williams showed that the line graph L( G) is hamiltonian if and only if the graph G has a dominating eulerian subgraph. Also, motivated by the Chinese Postman Problem, Boesch et al. introduced supereulerian graphs which contain spanning closed trails. In the spanning trail part of my dissertation, I proved some results based on supereulerian graphs and, a more general case, spanning trails.;Let alpha(G), alpha'(G), kappa( G) and kappa'(G) denote the independence number, the matching number, connectivity and edge connectivity of a graph G, respectively. First, we discuss the 3-edge-connected graphs with bounded edge-cuts of size 3, and prove that any 3-edge-connected graph with at most 11 edge cuts of size 3 is supereulerian, which improves Catlin's result. Second, having the idea from Chvatal-Erdos Theorem which states that every graph G with kappa(G) ≥ alpha( G) is hamiltonian, we find families of finite graphs F 1 and F2 such that if a connected graph G satisfies kappa'(G) ≥ alpha(G) -- 1 (resp. kappa'(G) ≥ 3 and alpha'( G) ≤ 7), then G has a spanning closed trail if and only if G is not contractible to a member of F1 (resp. F2). Third, by solving a conjecture posed in [Discrete Math. 306 (2006) 87-98], we prove if G is essentially 4-edge-connected, then for any edge subset X0 ⊆ E(G) with |X0| ≤ 3 and any distinct edges e, e' 2 ∈ E(G), G has a spanning ( e, e')-trail containing all edges in X0.;The results on spanning trees in my dissertation concern spanning tree packing and covering. We find a characterization of spanning tree packing and covering based on degree sequence. Let tau(G) be the maximum number of edge-disjoint spanning trees in G, a(G) be the minimum number of spanning trees whose union covers E(G). We prove that, given a graphic sequence d = (d1, d2···dn) (d1 ≥ d2 ≥···≥ dn) and integers k2 ≥ k1 > 0, there exists a simple graph G with degree sequence d satisfying k 1 ≤ tau(G) ≤ a(G) ≤ k2 if and only if dn ≥ k1 and 2k1(n -- 1) ≤ Sigmani =1 di ≤ 2k2( n -- 1 |I| -- 1) + 2Sigma i∈I di, where I = {lcub}i : di < k2{rcub}.

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