Graph Theory Course

Licence L2

Z.GUELLIL
 Chapter 1
Fundamental Concepts
 History (1/3)
• Euler (1735) mathematical curiosity: Start from one bank, cross the seven bridges of the city of
KÖNESBERG (Germany) once and only once and return to the starting point.

• The Irish mathematician Sir William Hamilton (1805-1865) worked on the travelling salesman
problem.
• Francis Guthrie (1852), a South African mathematician, stated the four-colour problem during a
discussion with his brother, who asked his teacher Auguste De Morgan if any map could be
coloured with four colours so that neighbouring countries had different colours.

3
 History (2/3)
• Julius Petersen at the end of the 19th century was interested in spanning
subgraphs, that is, graphs containing all the vertices but only some of the
edges. We saw the emergence of graph factorisation problems in this way. A
spanning subgraph is called a k-factor if each of its vertices has k edges, and
the first theorems were given.
• In the mid-19th century, the British mathematician Arthur Cayley became
interested in trees, a special type of graph that does not have a cycle, i.e. in
which it is impossible to return to a starting point without going in the
opposite direction.

Graph Theory 4
 History (3/3)
• But it was only with the Second World War that the practice was organized
for the first time and acquired its name.
• In 1940, Patrick Blackett was called by the British general staff to lead the first
operational research team to solve certain problems such as the optimal
location of surveillance radars.
• From 1946 onwards, TG experienced intense development thanks to
researchers motivated by the resolution of concrete problems.
• Among them, Esdger Djikstra (1959) for the routing problem, Ford and
Fulkerson (1956) for the maximum flow problem .
• Bernard Roy (1958) developed the MPM method for the scheduling problem.

Graph Theory 5
 Graph Theory
• Graph theory is a powerful set of tools for modeling and solving real-world
problems.
• Definition :
• A Graph is a collection of vertices (nodes) and edges (links) connecting pairs of vertices.
• A graph is used to describe a set of objects and their relationships, that is to say the links
(edges) between the objects ( nodes /vertices).
• A graph ( G ), denoted as ( G = (X, U) ), is defined by:
• A finite set of vertices ( X ): The fundamental units or points in the graph.
• A finite set of edges/arcs ( U ): Each edge/arc connects a pair of vertices in ( X ).

Give me some examples….

Graph Theory 6
 Undirected graph
• An undirected graph G is a pair (V, E).
• V is a (finite) set of objects. The elements of V are called the vertices of the graph.
• E is a subset of VxV . The elements of E are called the edges of the graph.
• An edge "e" of the graph is a pair e=(x , y) = (y, x) of vertices.
• Vertices x and y are the endpoints of the edge.

𝐸 ={……}
𝑉 ={……}
 I.2. Degree of a vertex/graph
• Two vertices x and y are adjacent if there exists the edge ( x,y ) in E . The
vertices x and y are then said to be neighbors
• An edge is incident to a vertex x if x is one of its endpoints.
• The degree of a vertex x of G is the number of edges incident to x . It is
denoted d (x) .
• For a simple graph the degree of x also corresponds to the number of vertices
adjacent to x .
• For a simple graph of order n, the degree of a vertex is an integer between 0
and n-1
• A vertex of degree 0 is said to be isolated : it is not connected to any other
vertex.
Example
Vertex Degree
a 1
b 2
c
d 5
e
f
g
h
Degree of a vertex/graph
• Property 1: The sum of the degrees of the vertices of a graph is equal
to 2 times its number of edges. σ𝑥∈𝑉 𝑑(𝑥) = 2 ∗ ||𝐸||

• Property 2: The number of odd-degree vertices in a graph is even.

• The degree of a graph is the maximum degree of all its vertices.
• A graph whose vertices all have the same degree is said to be regular .
• If the common degree is k , then the graph is said to be k-regular.
Subgraph and partial graph
• To characterize the structure of a graph in a less local way, it is
possible to search for remarkable parts of the graph, by restricting
either :
• The set of vertices (subgraph), or
• The set of edges (partial graph).
 Subgraph
• Definition : A subgraph is formed from a subset of a graph's vertices and
edges.
• Formally : For a graph G = (V, E)
A subgraph of G is a graph H=(W, E(W) ) such that W is a subset of V , and
E(W) are the edges induced by E on W , that is to say the edges of E whose 2
extremities are vertices of W . ,
E(W)= {(X,Y) ∈ E /, X,Y ∈ W}
• A subgraph of G consists of considering only a part of the vertices of V and
the links induced by E.
• For example, if G represents the daily air connections between the main cities
of the world, a possible subgraph is to restrict itself to the daily connections
between the main European cities.
 Partial graph
• A partial graph of G consists of considering only a part of the edges of E.
• Retains all the vertices of the original graph while having a reduced number
of edges.
• The vertex set remains identical to that of the original graph,
• The edge set is a subset, meaning some connections between the vertices
may be missing.
• A partial graph of G =(V, E) is a graph I=(V,F) such that F is a subset of E.
• Example : a possible partial graph is to consider only the daily connections
of less than 3 hours between the main cities of the world.
Complete graph
• Definition: A complete graph is a type of graph in which every pair of
distinct vertices is connected by an edge. In other words, there is an
edge between every two vertices,
• Ensuring that each vertex has a direct connection to every other
vertex in the graph.
• In a complete graph of order n is denoted Kn :
• Each vertex is of degree n-1 .
• The number of edges in a complete graph is: n*(n-1) / 2
 Clique
• A clique in a graph is a subset of vertices where each pair of vertices is
directly connected by an edge, forming a complete subgraph.
• It is a maximal complete subgraph:
• Meaning that no more vertices can be added to the clique without losing the
property of complete connectivity.
• In other words, adding more vertices would break the condition that every two
vertices in the clique are adjacent.
• The size of a clique is the number of vertices it contains.
• Example: In a social network, a clique could represent a group of people
who all know each other directly.
Stable (Independent Set)
• A stable or independent set is a subset of vertices such that no two
vertices in the subset are adjacent (i.e., there are no edges between
any pair of vertices in the set). This is the opposite of a clique.
• A stable is a subgraph without edges.
• Applications: Independent sets are relevant in scheduling problems,
where tasks (represented by vertices) that conflict (connected by
edges) cannot be scheduled simultaneously.
• Example : In a map coloring problem, vertices of the same color form
an independent set, as no two adjacent regions can have the same
color.
 Example
• 2 cliques of order 3 defined by the sets of vertices { d, g, h } and { d, e, h }
• 4 stable sets of order 4 defined by the sets of vertices { a, b, e, g } and { a, b, h, f } {
a, c, h, f } and { a, b, e, f }
 Chain 1/4

• Definition: A chain in G is a sequence having as its elements alternately

vertices and edges, starting and ending with a vertex, and such that each
edge is framed by its endpoints.
• We will say that the chain connects the first vertex of the sequence to
the last vertex.
• The chain has the length of the number of edges in the chain.
 Chain (Example) 2/4
• The following graph contains among others
the chains ( v 1, e 1, v 2, e 2, v 3, e 5, v 5) and
( v 4, e 4, v 3, e 2, v 2, e 1, v 1).

• A string is not changed by reversing the order

of the elements in the corresponding
sequence. Thus, the strings ( v 1, e 3, v 3, e 4,
v 4) and ( v 4, e 4, v 3, e 3, v 1) are identical.
 Chain (Definition) 3/4
• The distance between two vertices is called the length of the smallest chain
connecting them.
• The diameter of a graph is called the longest distance between two vertices.
• A chain is elementary if each vertex appears in it at most once.
Property: In a graph G of order n
• Any elementary chain is of length at most n- 1
• The number of elementary chains in the graph is finite.
 Chain (Definition) 4/4

• A chain is simple if each edge appears at most once.

In the previous graph, (v1, e1, v2, e2, v3) is a simple, elementary chain.
• A chain whose starting and ending vertices are the same is called a closed
chain.
• In the previous graph, (v4, e4, v3, e5, v5, e5, v3, e4, v4) is a closed chain.
 Cycle
• A simple closed chain is called a cycle .
In the following graph, the chain (v1, e1, v2, e2, v3, e3, v1) is a cycle.
 Connectivity of a graph
• Definition: A graph is connected if and only if there exists a chain
between every pair of vertices.
• If the graph G is not connected, then it appears as a set of connected
graphs.
• Each of these graphs is a particular subgraph of G , called a connected
component .
• A connected Graph has one connected component.
 Connectivity of a graph
Definition: A connected component of a graph G is a maximally connected subgraph
G'=(V',E') : it is not possible to add other vertices to V' while preserving the connectivity of
the subgraph.
• A graph with only one connected component is simply a connected graph.
• An isolated vertex (of degree 0) always constitutes a connected component on its own.
• The relation on the vertices "there exists a chain between ..." is an equivalence relation
(reflexive, symmetric and transitive). The connected components of a graph correspond
to the equivalence classes of this relation.
o All vertices within the same connected component are related to each other by the
existence of paths (chains), forming a single equivalence class.
Property: A connected graph G of order n has at least n- 1 edges.
 Acyclic graph
A graph in which there are no cycles is said to be acyclic .
• Property 1: If in a graph G every vertex is of degree greater than or equal
to 2, then G has at least one cycle.
oThis simple property implies that a graph without a cycle has at least
one vertex of degree 0 or 1.
• Property 2: An acyclic graph G with n vertices has at most n- 1 edges.
 Acyclic graph
• Definition: For a graph G having m edges, n vertices and p connected
components, we define: n( G ) = m − n + p.
• n( G ) is called the cyclomatic number .
• We have an ( G ) > 0 for any graph G .
• n( G ) = 0 if and only if G is cycle-free. C

C D

• m: 4 D
• m: 4 A

•n:3 A •n:5 B

• p : 1 (the graph is connected) B

• p :1 (the graph is connected)
• n( G ) = 3 − 4 + 1 = 0. • n( G ) = 4 − 5 + 1= 2 >0.
• This graph is cycle-free (Acyclic graph)