Graph Theory Applications

The first part of this text covers the main graph theoretic topics: connectivity, trees, traversability, planarity, colouring, covering, matching, digraphs, networks, matrices of a graph, graph theoretic algorithms, and matroids. These concepts are then applied in the second part to problems in engineering, operations research, and science as well as to an interesting set of miscellaneous problems, thus illustrating their broad applicability. Every effort has been made to present applications that use not merely the notation and terminology of graph theory, but also its actual mathematical results. Some of the applications, such as in molecular evolution, facilities layout, and graffic network design, have never appeared before in book form. Written at an advanced undergraduate to beginning graduate level, this book is suitable for students of mathematics, engineering, operations research, computer science, and physical sciences as well as for researchers and practitioners with an interest in graph theoretic modelling.

In the spectrum of mathematics, graph theory which studies a mathe matical structure on a set of elements with a binary relation, as a recognized discipline, is a relative newcomer. In recent three decades the exciting and rapidly growing area of the subject abounds with new mathematical devel opments and significant applications to real-world problems. More and more colleges and universities have made it a required course for the senior or the beginning postgraduate students who are majoring in mathematics, computer science, electronics, scientific management and others. This book provides an introduction to graph theory for these students. The richness of theory and the wideness of applications make it impossi ble to include all topics in graph theory in a textbook for one semester. All materials presented in this book, however, I believe, are the most classical, fundamental, interesting and important. The method we deal with the mate rials is to particularly lay stress on digraphs, regarding undirected graphs as their special cases. My own experience from teaching out of the subject more than ten years at University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) shows that this treatment makes hardly the course di:fficult, but much more accords with the essence and the development trend of the subject.

Graph theory is an area in discrete mathematics which studies configurations (called graphs) involving a set of vertices interconnected by edges. This book is intended as a general introduction to graph theory and, in particular, as a resource book for junior college students and teachers reading and teaching the subject at H3 Level in the new Singapore mathematics curriculum for junior college. The book builds on the verity that graph theory at this level is a subject that lends itself well to the development of mathematical reasoning and proof.

Over 1500 problems are used to illustrate concepts, related to different topics, and introduce applications.Over 1000 exercises in the text with many different types of questions posed. Precise mathematical language is used without excessive formalism and abstraction. Care has been taken to balance the mix of notation and words in mathematical statements. Problem sets are stated clearly and unambiguously, and all are carefully graded for various levels of difficulty. This text has been carefully designed for flexible use.

The book has many important features which make it suitable for both undergraduate and postgraduate students in various branches of engineering and general and applied sciences. The important topics interrelating Mathematics & Computer Science are also covered briefly. The book is useful to readers with a wide range of backgrounds including Mathematics, Computer Science/Computer Applications and Operational Research. While dealing with theorems and algorithms, emphasis is laid on constructions which consist of formal proofs, examples with applications. Uptill, there is scarcity of books in the open literature which cover all the things including most importantly various algorithms and applications with examples.

An applications-oriented text detailing the latest research in graph theory and computer science. Leading contributors cover such important topics as: tiling problems and graph factors; partitioning the nodes of a graph; diameter vulnerability in networks; edge-disjoint Hamiltonian cycles; the cochromatic number of graphs in a switching sequence; and more.

Graph theory is becoming increasingly significant as it is applied to other areas of mathematics, science and technology. It is being actively used in fields as varied as biochemistry (genomics), electrical engineering (communication networks and coding theory), computer science (algorithms and computation) and operations research (scheduling). The powerful combinatorial methods found in graph theory have also been used to prove fundamental results in other areas of pure mathematics. This book, besides giving a general outlook of these facts, includes new graph theoretical proofs of Fermat’s Little Theorem and the Nielson-Schreier Theorem. New applications to DNA sequencing (the SNP assembly problem) and computer network security (worm propagation) using minimum vertex covers in graphs are discussed. We also show how to apply edge coloring and matching in graphs for scheduling (the timetabling problem) and vertex coloring in graphs for map coloring and the assignment of frequencies in GSM mobile phone networks. Finally, we revisit the classical problem of finding re-entrant knight’s tours on a chessboard using Hamiltonian circuits in graphs.