GRAPHICAL PROPERTIES OF POLYHEXES - PERFECT MATCHING VECTOR AND FORCING Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • From the viewpoint of graph theory and its applications, subgraphs of the tiling of the plane with unit squares have long been studied in statistical mechanics, In organic chemistry, a much more relevant case concerns subgraphs of the tiling with unit hexagons. Our purpose here is to take a mathematical view of such polyhex graphs G and study two novel concepts concerning perfect matchings M. First, the forcing number of M is the smallest number of edges of M which are not contained in any other perfect matching of G. Second, the perfect matching vector of M is written (n3, n2, n1, n0), where nk is the number of hexagons with exactly k edges in M. We establish some initial results involving these two concepts and pose some questions. 1991 J.C. Baltzer AG, Scientific Publishing Company.

published proceedings

  • JOURNAL OF MATHEMATICAL CHEMISTRY

author list (cited authors)

  • HARARY, F., KLEIN, D. J., & ZIVKOVIC, T. P.

citation count

  • 80

complete list of authors

  • HARARY, F||KLEIN, DJ||ZIVKOVIC, TP

publication date

  • December 1991