Dong Fengming

The chromatic polynomial of a simple graph G with n > 0 vertices is a polynomial Σnk =1α(G, k)(x)k of degree n, where (x)k = x(x−1) . . . (x−k+1) and α(G, k) is real for all k. The adjoint polynomial of G is defined to be Σnk=1α(G, k)μk, where G is the complement of G. We find the zeros of the adjoint polynomials of paths and cycles.

Let (a1, a2, · · · , ak) denote the graph obtained by connecting two distinct vertices with k independent paths of lengths a1, a2, · · · , ak respectively. Assume that 2 ≤ a1 ≤ a2 ≤ · · · ≤ ak. We prove that the graph θ (a1, a2, · · · , ak) is chromatically unique if ak < a1 +a2, and find examples showing that θ (a1, a2, · · · , ak) may not be chromatically unique if ak = a1 + a2.

Two graphs are defined to be adjointly equivalent if their complements are chromatically equivalent. We study the properties of two invariants under adjoint equivalence.

For a connected graph G and any non-empty S ⊆ V (G), S is called a weakly connected dominating set of G if the subgraph obtained from G by removing all edges each joining any two vertices in V (G) \ S is connected. The weakly connected domination number γw(G) is defined to be the minimum integer k with |S| = k for some weakly connected dominating set S of G. In this note, we extend a result on the lower bound for the weakly connected domination number γw(G) on trees to cycle-e-disjoint graphs, i.e., graphs in which no cycles share a common edge. More specifically, we show that if G is a connected cycle-e-disjoint graph, then γw(G) ≥ (|V (G)| − v1(G) − nc(G) − noc(G) + 1)/2, where nc(G) is the number of cycles in G, noc(G) is the number of odd cycles in G and v1(G) is the number of vertices of degree 1 in G. The graphs for which equality holds are also characterised.

For a given graph G, let P (G , A) be the chromatic polynomial of G, where A is considered to be a real number. In this paper, we study the bounds for P (G , A )/P (G , A — 1) and P (G , A )/P (G - x, A), where x is a vertex in G, A > n and n is the number of vertices of G.

Let G be a connected graph with vertex set V (G). A set S of vertices in G is called a weakly connected dominating set of G if (i) S is a dominating set of G and (ii) the graph obtained from G by removing all edges joining two vertices in V (G) \ S is connected. A weakly connected dominating set S of G is said to be minimum or a γw-set if |S| is minimum among all weakly connected dominating sets of G. We say that G is γw-unique if it has a unique γw-set. Recently, a constructive characterisation of γw-unique trees was obtained by Lemanska and Raczek [Czechoslovak Math. J. 59 (134) (2009), 95–100]. A graph is said to be cycle-disjoint if no two cycles in G have a vertex in common. In this paper, we extend the above result on trees by establishing a constructive characterisation of γw-unique cycle-disjoint graphs.

Let P be an edge-property of graphs. For any graph G we construct a polynomial Ψ(G, η,P), in an indeterminate η, in which the coefficient of ηr for any r ≥ 0 gives the number of subsets of E(G) that have cardinality r and satisfy P. An example is the well known matching polynomial of a graph. After studying the properties of Ψ(G, η,P) in general, we specialise to two particular edge-properties: that of being an edge-covering and that of inducing an acyclic subgraph. The resulting polynomials, called the edge-cover and acyclic polynomials respectively, are studied and recursive formulae for computing them are derived. As examples we calculate these polynomials for paths and cycles.