On a Poset of Trees II

In this paper we study problems where one has to prove that certain graph parameter attains its maximum at the star and its minimum at the path among the trees on a fixed number of vertices. We give many applications of the socalled generalized tree shift which seems to be a powerful tool to attack the problems of the above mentioned kind. We show that the generalized tree shift increases the largest eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix and Laplacian matrix, decreases the coefficients of the characteristic polynomials of these matrices in absolute value. We will prove similar theorems for the independence polynomial and the edge cover polynomial. The generalized tree shift induces a partially ordered set on trees having fixed number of vertices. The smallest element of this poset is the path, largest element is the star. Hence the above mentioned results imply the extremality of the path and the star for these parameters.