Let $D$ be an oriented graph. The inversion of a set $X$ of vertices in $D$ consists in reversing the direction of all arcs with both ends in $X$. The inversion number of $D$, denoted by ${rm inv}(D)$, is the minimum number of
We show that the cop number of every generalized Petersen graph is at most 4. The strategy is to play a modified game of cops and robbers on an infinite cyclic covering space where the objective is to capture the robber or force the robber towards an end of the infinite graph. We prove that finite isometric subtrees are 1-guardable and apply this to determine the exact cop number of some families of generalized Petersen graphs. We also extend these ideas to prove that the cop number of any connected I-graph is at most 5.
A well-known conjecture by Lovasz and Plummer from the 1970s asserted that a bridgeless cubic graph has exponentially many perfect matchings. It was solved in the affirmative by Esperet et al. (Adv. Math. 2011). On the other hand, Chudnovsky and Seymour (Combinatorica 2012) proved the conjecture in the special case of cubic planar graphs. In our work we consider random bridgeless cubic planar graphs with the uniform distribution on graphs with $n$ vertices. Under this model we show that the expected number of perfect matchings in labeled bridgeless cubic planar graphs is asymptotically $cgamma^n$, where $c>0$ and $gamma sim 1.14196$ is an explicit algebraic number. We also compute the expected number of perfect matchings in (non necessarily bridgeless) cubic planar graphs and provide lower bounds for unlabeled graphs. Our starting point is a correspondence between counting perfect matchings in rooted cubic planar maps and the partition function of the Ising model in rooted triangulations.
We focus on counting the number of labeled graphs on $n$ vertices and treewidth at most $k$ (or equivalently, the number of labeled partial $k$-trees), which we denote by $T_{n,k}$. So far, only the particular cases $T_{n,1}$ and $T_{n,2}$ had been studied. We show that $$ left(c cdot frac{kcdot 2^k cdot n}{log k} right)^n cdot 2^{-frac{k(k+3)}{2}} cdot k^{-2k-2} leq T_{n,k} leq left(k cdot 2^k cdot nright)^n cdot 2^{-frac{k(k+1)}{2}} cdot k^{-k}, $$ for $k > 1$ and some explicit absolute constant $c > 0$. The upper bound is an immediate consequence of the well-known number of labeled $k$-trees, while the lower bound is obtained from an explicit algorithmic construction. It follows from this construction that both bounds also apply to graphs of pathwidth and proper-pathwidth at most $k$.
An orientation of $G$ is a digraph obtained from $G$ by replacing each edge by exactly one of two possible arcs with the same endpoints. We call an orientation emph{proper} if neighbouring vertices have different in-degrees. The proper orientation number of a graph $G$, denoted by $vec{chi}(G)$, is the minimum maximum in-degree of a proper orientation of G. Araujo et al. (Theor. Comput. Sci. 639 (2016) 14--25) asked whether there is a constant $c$ such that $vec{chi}(G)leq c$ for every outerplanar graph $G$ and showed that $vec{chi}(G)leq 7$ for every cactus $G.$ We prove that $vec{chi}(G)leq 3$ if $G$ is a triangle-free $2$-connected outerplanar graph and $vec{chi}(G)leq 4$ if $G$ is a triangle-free bridgeless outerplanar graph.