In mathematics and computer science, graph theory is the study of graphs, which are mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects. A graph in this context is made up of vertices (also called nodes or points) which are connected by edges (also called arcs, links, or lines). A distinction is made between undirected graphs, where edges link two vertices symmetrically, and directed graphs, where edges link two vertices asymmetrically. Graphs are one of the principal objects of study in discrete mathematics.
Definition and etymology
Graph theory is a branch of mathematics that studies graphs, mathematical structures for modelling pairwise relations between objects. It is part of discrete mathematics, often considered part of combinatorics, although it is a stand-alone field due to its great growth and distinct from other fields, having its own kind of problems. The term "graph" was introduced by James Joseph Sylvester in a paper published in 1878 in Nature, where he drew an analogy between "quantic invariants" and "co-variants" of algebra and molecular diagrams. The definition of a graph can vary, but one can understand that a graph is a structure consisting of vertices (also called nodes or points) and edges (also called arcs, links, or lines). Two vertices of an edge are called the endpoints. Occasionally, a graph is called an undirected graph, to distinguish it from a directed graph. A directed graph is a graph where each edge has an assignment direction known as orientation, designated with an arrow. A mixed graph can have edges that may be directed, and some may be undirected. A graph can also be called a simple graph, to distinguish it from a multigraph. A multigraph allows many edges to have the same pair of endpoints, and it also allows an edge to connect a vertex to itself, known as a loop. A graph can have its edges assigned a number, which is known as the weight. Such a graph is called a weighted graph.
History
In 1736, Leonhard Euler published a paper titled Solutio Problematis ad Geometriam Situs Pertinentis on the Seven Bridges of Königsberg, which is regarded as the first paper in the history of graph theory. Euler's paper and Alexandre-Théophile Vandermonde's 1771 Remarques sur les Problèmes de Situation paper on the knight's tour carried on with the analysis situs, initiated by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Euler's characteristic relating the number of edges, vertices, and faces of a convex polyhedron was studied and generalized by Augustin-Louis Cauchy and Simon Antoine Jean L'Huilier, and represents the beginning of the branch of mathematics known as topology. More than one century after Euler's paper on the bridges of Königsberg, and while Johann Benedict Listing was introducing the concept of topology, Arthur Cayley was led by an interest in particular analytical forms arising from differential calculus to study a particular class of graphs, the trees. This study had many implications for theoretical chemistry. The techniques he used mainly concern the enumeration of graphs with particular properties. Enumerative graph theory then arose from the results of Cayley and the fundamental results published by Pólya between 1935 and 1937. These were generalized by Nicolaas Govert de Bruijn in 1959. Cayley linked his results on trees with contemporary studies of chemical composition. The fusion of ideas from mathematics with those from chemistry began what has become part of the standard terminology of graph theory. The autonomous development of topology from 1860 to 1930 fertilized graph theory back through the works of Camille Jordan, Kazimierz Kuratowski, and Hassler Whitney. Another important factor in the common development of graph theory and topology came from the use of the techniques of modern algebra. The first example of such a use comes from the work of the physicist Gustav Kirchhoff, who published in 1845 his Kirchhoff's circuit laws for calculating the voltage and current in electric circuits. The first textbook on graph theory was written by Dénes Kőnig, and published in 1936. Another book by Frank Harary, published in 1969, was "considered the world over to be the definitive textbook on the subject", and enabled mathematicians, chemists, electrical engineers and social scientists to talk to each other. Harary donated all of the royalties to fund the Pólya Prize. One of the most famous problems in graph theory is the four color problem: Is it true that any map drawn in the plane may have its regions colored with four colors, in such a way that any two regions having a common border have different colors? This problem was first posed by Francis Guthrie in 1852, and its first written record is in a letter of Augustus De Morgan addressed to William Rowan Hamilton the same year. Many incorrect proofs have been proposed, including those by Augustin Cayley, Alfred Kempe, and others. The study and the generalization of this problem by Peter Tait, Percy John Heawood, Frank P. Ramsey and Hadwiger led to the study of the colorings of the graphs embedded on surfaces with arbitrary genus. Tait's reformulation generated a new class of problems, the factorization problems, particularly studied by Petersen and Dénes Kőnig. The works of Ramsey on colorations, and more specially, the results obtained by Pál Turán in 1941, were at the origin of another branch of graph theory, known as extremal graph theory. The four-color problem remained unsolved for more than a century. In 1969, Heinrich Heesch published a method for solving the problem using computers. A computer-aided proof produced in 1976 by Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken makes fundamental use of the notion of "discharging" developed by Heesch. The proof involved checking the properties of 1,936 configurations by computer, and was not fully accepted at the time due to its complexity. A simpler proof considering only 633 configurations was given twenty years later by Robertson, Seymour, Sanders and Thomas. The introduction of probabilistic methods in graph theory, especially in the study of Erdős and Rényi of the asymptotic probability of graph connectivity, gave rise to yet another branch, known as random graph theory, which has been a fruitful source of graph-theoretic results.
Subareas
Topological graph theory
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