Discrete Mathematics: An Open Introduction, 4th Edition

Graph Theory is a relatively new area of mathematics, first studied by the super famous mathematician Leonhard Euler in 1735. Since then it has blossomed into a powerful tool used in nearly every branch of science and is currently an active area of mathematics research.

The problem above, known as the Seven Bridges of Königsberg, is the problem that originally inspired graph theory. Consider a “different” problem: Below is a drawing of four dots connected by some lines. Is it possible to trace over each line once and only once (without lifting your pencil, starting and ending on a dot)?

There is an obvious connection between these two problems. Any path in the dot and line drawing corresponds exactly to a path over the bridges of Königsberg.

Pictures like this dot and line drawing are called graphs (although technically, the picture above is a multigraph). Graphs are made up of a collection of dots called vertices and lines connecting those dots called edges. When two vertices are connected by an edge, we say they are adjacent. The nice thing about looking at graphs instead of pictures of rivers, islands, and bridges is that we now have a mathematical object to study. We have distilled the “important” parts of the bridge picture for the problem. It does not matter how big the islands are, what the bridges are made out of, if the river contains alligators, etc. All that matters is which land masses are connected to which other land masses, and how many times. This was the great insight Euler had.

We will return to the question of finding paths through graphs in Section 2.4. In this section, we will explore various ways that graphs can be used to represent, or model, real-world problems. Along the way, we will introduce some basic definitions, terminology, and notation that will be used in the rest of the chapter.

Before we start studying graphs, we need to agree upon what a graph is. While we almost always think of graphs as pictures (dots connected by lines), this is fairly ambiguous. Do the lines need to be straight? Does it matter how long the lines are or how large the dots are? Can there be two lines connecting the same pair of dots? Can one line connect three dots?

The way we avoid ambiguities in mathematics is to provide concrete and rigorous definitions. Crafting good definitions is not easy, but it is incredibly important. The definition is the agreed-upon starting point from which all truths in mathematics proceed. Is there a graph with no edges? We have to look at the definition to see if this is possible.

We want our definition to be precise and unambiguous, but it also must agree with our intuition for the objects we are studying. It needs to be useful: We could define a graph to be a six-legged mammal, but that would not let us solve any problems about bridges. Instead, here is the (now) standard definition of a graph.

Looking at sets and sets of 2-element sets is difficult to process. That is why we often draw a representation of these sets. We put a dot down for each vertex, and connect two dots with a line precisely when those two vertices are one of the 2-element subsets in our set of edges. Thus one way to draw the graph described above is this:

However we could also have drawn the graph differently. For example either of these:

We should be careful about what it means for two graphs to be “the same.” Actually, given our definition, this is easy: Are the vertex sets equal? Are the edge sets equal? We know what it means for sets to be equal, and graphs are nothing but a pair of two special sorts of sets.

Even if two graphs are not equal, they might be basically the same. The graphs in the previous example could be drawn like this:

Graphs that are basically the same (but perhaps not equal) are called isomorphic. We will give a precise definition of this term after a quick example:

Intuitively, graphs are isomorphic if they are basically the same, or better yet, if they are the same except for the names of the vertices. To make the concept of renaming vertices precise, we give the following definitions:

An isomorphism is simply a function which renames the vertices. It must be a bijection so every vertex gets a new name. These newly named vertices must be connected by edges precisely when they were connected by edges with their old names.

Sometimes we will talk about a graph with a special name (like \(K_n\) or the Petersen graph) or perhaps draw a graph without any labels. In this case, we are really referring to all graphs isomorphic to any copy of that particular graph. A collection of isomorphic graphs is often called an isomorphism class.

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This is not unlike geometry, where we might have more than one copy of a particular triangle. There instead of isomorphic we say congruent.

There are other relationships between graphs that we care about, other than equality and being isomorphic. For example, compare the following pair of graphs:

These are definitely not isomorphic, but notice that the graph on the right looks like it might be part of the graph on the left, especially if we draw it like this:

We would like to say that the smaller graph is a subgraph of the larger.

We should give a careful definition of this. In fact, there are two reasonable notions for what a subgraph should mean.

Notice that every induced subgraph is also an ordinary subgraph, but not conversely. Think of a subgraph as the result of deleting some vertices and edges from the larger graph. For the subgraph to be an induced subgraph, we can still delete vertices, but now we only delete those edges that included the deleted vertices.

Back to some basic graph theory definitions. Notice that all the graphs we have drawn above have the property that no pair of vertices is connected more than once, and no vertex is connected to itself. Graphs like these are sometimes called simple, although we will just call them graphs. This is because our definition of a graph says that the edges form a set of 2-element subsets of the vertices. Remember that it doesn’t make sense to say a set contains an element more than once. So no pair of vertices can be connected by an edge more than once. Also, since each edge must be a set containing two vertices, we cannot have a single vertex connected to itself by an edge.

That said, there are times we want to consider double (or more) edges and single-edge loops. For example, the “graph” we drew for the Bridges of Königsberg problem had double edges because there really are two bridges connecting a particular island to the near shore. We will call these objects multigraphs. This is a good name: A multiset is a set in which we are allowed to include a single element multiple times.

The graphs above are also connected: you can get from any vertex to any other vertex by following some path of edges. A graph that is not connected can be thought of as two separate graphs drawn close together. For example, the following graph is NOT connected because there is no path from \(a\) to \(b\text{:}\)

Vertices in a graph do not always have edges between them. If we add all possible edges, then the resulting graph is called complete. That is, a graph is complete if every pair of vertices is connected by an edge. Since a graph is determined completely by which vertices are adjacent to which other vertices, there is only one complete graph with a given number of vertices. We give these a special name: \(K_n\) is the complete graph on \(n\) vertices.

Each vertex in \(K_n\) is adjacent to \(n-1\) other vertices. We call the number of edges emanating from a given vertex the degree of that vertex. So every vertex in \(K_n\) has degree \(n-1\text{.}\) How many edges does \(K_n\) have? One might think the answer should be \(n(n-1)\text{,}\) since we count \(n-1\) edges \(n\) times (once for each vertex). However, each edge is incident to 2 vertices, so we counted every edge exactly twice. Thus there are \(n(n-1)/2\) edges in \(K_n\text{.}\) Alternatively, we can say there are \({n \choose 2}\) edges, since to draw an edge we must choose 2 of the \(n\) vertices.

In general, if we know the degrees of all the vertices in a graph, we can find the number of edges. The sum of the degrees of all vertices will always be twice the number of edges, since each edge adds to the degree of two vertices. Notice this means that the sum of the degrees of all vertices in any graph must be even!

This is our first example of a general result about all graphs. It seems innocent enough, but we will use it to prove all sorts of other statements. So let’s give it a name and state it formally.

One use for the lemma is to actually find the number of edges in a graph. To do this, you must be given the degree sequence for the graph (or be able to find it from other information). This is a list of every degree of every vertex in the graph, generally written in non-increasing order.

The handshake lemma also tells us what is not possible.

We can generalize the previous example to get the following proposition.

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A proposition is a general statement in mathematics, similar to a theorem, although generally of lesser importance.

We will consider further applications of the handshake lemma in the exercises.

One final definition: We say a graph is bipartite if the vertices can be divided into two sets, \(A\) and \(B\text{,}\) with no two vertices in \(A\) adjacent and no two vertices in \(B\) adjacent. The vertices in \(A\) can be adjacent to some or all of the vertices in \(B\text{.}\) If each vertex in \(A\) is adjacent to all the vertices in \(B\text{,}\) then the graph is a complete bipartite graph, and gets a special name: \(K_{m,n}\text{,}\) where \(|A| = m\) and \(|B| = n\text{.}\)