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Introduction to Graph Theory

Presentation · March 2011

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.25721.88166

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Padmanava Samanta
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 Graph Theory

By

Dr. Padmanava Samanta

Asst. Professor
Department of Mathematics
Berhampur University
Berhampur-760 007
Email: [email protected]
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Module-1

Introduction to graph theory

1.1. The Definition of a Graph:

The graph is a set of points in a plane or in a space and a set of

line segment of curve each of which either joins two points or join to

itself.

A graph G = (V(G), E(G)) consisting of two finite steps. V(G), the

vertex set of the graph denoted by V, which is non-empty set of

elements called vertices and E(G), the edge set of the graph, often

denoted by just E, which is a possibly empty set of elements called

edges.

Each edge e in E has a set of one or two vertices associated to it

which are called it’s end points.

Diagrammatic Representation of a Graph:

Figure-1.1

The vertex set is V = {S,T,U,V,W,X,Y,Z} the edge set E has 10

edges and these edges are assigned the unordered pair of vertices.
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{(S,X), (S,Z), (T,W), (T,X), (T,Z), (U,Y), (U,Z), (V,W), (V,Y), (W,Y)}

• Note that the definition of a graph allows the possibility of the

edge e having identical end vertices, i.e. It is possible to have a

vertex u joined to itself by an edge. Such an edge is called a

loop.

We now give an example to illustrate the above definition.

Example: Let G = (V,E) where

{
V = {a, b, c, d , e}, E = e1 , e2 , e3 ,e 4 , e5 , e6 , e7 , e8 }
And the ends of the edges are given by:

e1 ↔ (a, b ), e2 ↔ (b, c ), e3 ↔ (c, c ), e4 ↔ (c, d ),

e5 ↔ (b, d ), e6 ↔ (d , e ), e7 ↔ (b, e ), e8 ↔ (b, e ) .

We can then represent G diagrammatically as in Figure 1.2.

Figure 1.2: A Graph G with five vertices and eight edges

1.2. Applications of Graphs:

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Graphs can be used to model many types of relations and

processes in physical, biological, [1] social and information systems.

Many practical problems can be represented by graphs. Emphasizing

their application to real world systems, the term network is sometimes

defined to mean a graph in which attributes(e.g. names) are

associated with the nodes and / or edges.

In computer science, graphs are used to represent networks of

communication, data organization, computational devices, the flow of

computation, etc. For instance, the link structure of a website can be

represented by a directed graph, in which the vertices represent web

pages and directed edges represent links from one page to another. A

similar approach can be taken to problems in social media, [2] travel,

biology, computer chip design, and many other fields. The

development of algorithms to handle graphs is therefore of major

interest in computer science. The transformation of graphs is often

formalized and represented by graph rewrite systems. Complementary

to graph transformation systems focusing on rule-based in-memory

manipulation of graphs are graph databases geared towards

transaction-safe, persistent storing and querying of graph-structured

data.

Graph-theoretic methods, in various forms, have proven

particularly useful in linguistics, since natural language often lends

itself well to discrete structure. Traditionally, syntax and

compositional semantics follow tree-based structures, whose

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expressive power lies in the principle of compositionality, modeled in

a hierarchical graph. More contemporary approaches such as head-

driven phrase structure grammar model the syntax of natural

language using typed feature structures, which are directed acyclic

graphs. Within lexical semantics, especially as applied to computers,

modelling word meaning is easier when a given word is understood in

terms of related words; semantic networks are therefore important in

computational linguistics. Still other methods in phonology(e.g.

optimality theory, which uses lattice graphs) and morphology(e.g.

finite state morphology, using finite state transducers) are common in

the analysis of language as a graph. Indeed, the usefulness of this

area of mathematics to linguistics has borne organizations such, as

TextGraphs, as well as various ‘Net’ projects, such as WordNet,

VerbNet, and others.

Graph theory is also used to study molecules in chemistry and

physics. In condensed matter physics, the three-dimensional

structure of complicated simulated atomic structures can be studied

quantitatively by gathering statistics on graph-theoretic properties

related to the topology of the atoms. In Chemistry a graph makes a

natural model for a molecule, where vertices represent atoms and

edges bonds. This approach is especially used in computer processing

of molecular structures, ranging from chemical editors to database

searching. In statistical physics, graphs can represent local

connections between interacting parts of a system, as well as the

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dynamics of a physical process on such systems. Similarly, in

computational neuroscience graphs can be used to represent

functional connections between brain areas that interact to give rise

to various cognitive processes, where the vertices represent different

areas of the brain and the edges represent the connections between

those areas. Graphs are also used to represent the micro-scale

channels of porous media, in which the vertices represent the pores

and the edges represent the smaller channels connecting the pores.

Graph Theory in Sociology: Morenosociogram(1953)[3]

Graph theory is also widely used in sociology as a way, for

example, to measure actors prestige or to explore rumor spreading,

notably through the use of social network analysis software. Under

the umbrella of social networks are many different types of graphs.[4]

Acquaintanceship and friendship graphs describe whether people

know each other. Influence graphs model whether certain people can

influence the behaviour of others. Finally, collaboration graphs model

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whether two people work together in a particular way, such as acting

in a movie together.

Likewise, graph theory is useful in biology and conservation

efforts where a vertex can represent regions where certain species

exist (or inhabit) and the edges represent migration paths, or

movement between the regions. This information is important when

looking at breeding patterns or tracking the spread of disease,

parasites or how changes to the movement can affect other species.

In mathematics, graphs are useful in geometry and certain

parts of topology such as knot theory. Algebric graph theory has close

links with group theory.

A graph structure can be extended by assigning a weight to

each edge of the graph. Graphs with weights, or weighted graphs, are

used to represent structures in which pairwise connections have some

numerical values. For example, if a graph represents a road network,

the weights could represent the length of each road.

1.3. History of Graph Theory:

The paper written by Leonhard Euler on the seven Bridges of

Königsberg and published in 1736 is regarded as the first paper in the

history of graph theory. This paper, as well as the one written by

Vandermonde on the knight problem, carried on with the analysis

situsinitiated by Leibniz. Euler’s formula relating the number of

edges, vertices, and faces of a convex polyhedron was studied and

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generalized by Cauchy and L’Huillier and represents the beginning of

the branch of mathematics known as topology.

More than one century after Euler’s paper on the bridges of

Königsberg and while Listing was introducing the concept of Topology,

Cayleywas led by an interest in particular analytical forms arising

from differential calculus to study a particular class of graphs, the

trees. This study had many implications for theoretical chemistry. The

techniques he used mainly concern the enumeration of graphs with

particular properties. Enumerative graph theory then arose from the

results of Cayley and the fundamental results published by Pólya

between 1935 and 1937. These were generalised by De Bruijn in

1959. Cayley linked his results on trees with contemporary studies of

chemical composition. The fusion of ideas from mathematics with

those from chemistry began what has become part of the standard

terminology of graph theory.

In particular, the term “graph” was introduced by Sylvester in a

paper published in 1878 in Nature, where he draws an analogy

between “quantic invariants” and “Co-variants” of algebra and

molecular diagrams.

The first Textbook on graph theory was written by Dènes Kőnig,

and published in 1936. Another book by Frank Harary, published in

1969, was ‘Considered the world over to be the definitive textbook on

the subject”, and enabled mathematicians, chemists, electrical

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engineers and social scientists to talk to each other. Harary donated

all of the royalties to fund the pólya prize.

One of the most famous and stimulating problems in graph

theory is the four color problem: “Is it true that any map drawn in the

plane may have its regions colored with four colors, in such a way

that any two regions having a common border have different colors?

“This problem was first posed by Francis Guthrie in 1852 and its first

written record is in a letter of De Morgan addressed to Hamilton the

same year. Many incorrect proofs have been proposed, including those

by Cayley, Kempe, and others. The study and the generalization of

this problem by Tait, Heawood, Ramsey and Hadwiger led to the study

of the colorings of the graphs embedded on surfaces with arbitrary

genus. Tait’s reformulation generated a new class of problems, the

factorization problems, particularly studied by Petersen and Kőnig.

The works of Ramsey on Colorations and more specially the results

obtained by Turàn in 1941 was at the origin of another branch of

graph theory, extremal graph theory.

The four color problem remained unsolved for more than a

century. In 1969 Heinrich Heesch published a method for solving the

problem using computers. A computer-aided proof produced in 1976

by Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken makes fundamental use of the

notion of “discharging” developed by Heesch . The proof involved

checking the properties of 1,936 configurations by computer, and was

not fully accepted at the time due to its complexity. A simpler proof
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considering only 633 configurations was given twenty years later by

Robertson, Seymour, Sanders and Thomas.

The autonomous development of Topology from 1860 and 1930

fertilized graph theory back through the works of Jordan, Kuratowski

and Whitney. Another important factor of common development of

graph theory and topology came from the use of the techniques of

modern algebra. The first example of such a use comes from the work

of the physicist Gustav Kirchhoff, who published in 1845 his

Kirchhoff’s Circuit laws for calculating the voltage and current in

electric circuits.

The introduction of probabilistic methods in graph theory,

especially in the study of Erdos and Renyi of the asymptotic

probability of graph connectivity, gave rise to yet another branch,

known as random graph theory, which has been a fruitful source of

graph-theoretic results.

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