Week 12

Posted on 2025-11-17

This week, we are going to begin our discuss of graphs.

  • lecture notes (Week 12 material begins on p. 88).

  • ps 12

    I’ve removed problem 6 from this homework set, because it asked you to prove something that wasn’t true. Apologies for this – I think I got in a hurry when preparing the assignment, and forgot to go back and check that last problem.

    Here is what I should have asked (!) (I’m only writing this for explanatory purposes – this is not part of the assignment!)

    Let \(\Gamma = (V,E)\) be a directed graph. Recall that for \(a,b \in V\), an edge \([a,b]\) is directed, so that \(a \not = b => [a,b] \not = [b,a]\).

    A source vertex is a vertex \(a \in V\) such that any edge \(e \in E\) incident to \(a\) has the form \([a,x]\) for some \(x \in V\).

    Similarly, a sink vertex is a vertex \(b \in V\) such that any edge \(e \in E\) incident with \(b\) has the form \([y,b]\) for some \(y \in V\).

    Suppose that there are \(m\) source vertices \(V_0\) and \(n\) sink vertices \(V_1\).

    Define a subset \(E \subseteq V_0 \times V_1\) by \[E = \{ (a.b) \in V_0 \times V_1 | \text{there is path in $\Gamma$ from $a$ to $b$}\}.\]

    Show that \((V_0 \cup V_1,E)\) is a subgraph of \(K_{m,n}\), the complete bi-partite graph of type \((m,n)\).