Spatial periodic forcing can entrain a pattern-forming system in the same way as temporal periodic forcing can entrain an oscillator. The forcing can lock the pattern's wave number to a fraction of the forcing wave number within tonguelike domains in the forcing parameter plane, it can increase the pattern's amplitude, and it can also create patterns below their onset. We derive these results u...

Zero forcing is an iterative graph coloring process where at each discrete time step, a colored vertex with a single uncolored neighbor forces that neighbor to become colored. The zero forcing number of a graph is the cardinality of the smallest set of initially colored vertices which forces the entire graph to eventually become colored. Connected forcing is a variant of zero forcing in which t...

The minimum rank of a simple graph G is the smallest possible rank over all symmetric real matrices A whose nonzero off-diagonal entries correspond to the edges of G. Using the zero forcing number, we prove that the minimum rank of the r-th butterfly network is 1 9 [ (3r + 1)2r+1 − 2(−1)r ] and that this is equal to the rank of its adjacency matrix.

The positive zero forcing number of a graph is a graph parameter that arises from a non-traditional type of graph colouring, and is related to a more conventional version of zero forcing. We establish a relation between the zero forcing and the fast-mixed searching, which implies some NP-completeness results for the zero forcing problem. For chordal graphs much is understood regarding the relat...

Given a simple undirected graph G and a positive integer k, the k-forcing number of G, denoted Fk(G), is the minimum number of vertices that need to be initially colored so that all vertices eventually become colored during the discrete dynamical process described by the following rule. Starting from an initial set of colored vertices and stopping when all vertices are colored: if a colored ver...

For a connected graph G = (V,E), a set S ⊆ E is called an edge-to-vertex geodetic set of G if every vertex of G is either incident with an edge of S or lies on a geodesic joining some pair of edges of S. The minimum cardinality of an edge-to-vertex geodetic set of G is gev(G). Any edge-to-vertex geodetic set of cardinality gev(G) is called an edge-to-vertex geodetic basis of G. A subset T ⊆ S i...

We show that countable increasing unions preserve a large family of well-studied covering properties, which are not necessarily σ-additive. Using this, together with infinite-combinatorial methods and simple forcing theoretic methods, we explain several phenomena, settle problems of Just, Miller, Scheepers and Szeptycki [15], Gruenhage and Szeptycki [13], Tsaban and Zdomskyy [33], and Tsaban [2...

We give characterizations for the (in ZFC unprovable) sentences “Every Σ12–set is measurable” and “Every ∆ 1 2–set is measurable” for various notions of measurability derived from well–known forcing partial orderings.

We consider vertex colorings of graphs in which adjacent vertices have distinct colors. A graph is s-chromatic if it is colorable in s colors and any coloring of it uses at least s colors. The forcing chromatic number Fχ(G) of an s-chromatic graph G is the smallest number of vertices which must be colored so that, with the restriction that s colors are used, every remaining vertex has its color...

For two vertices u and v in a graph G = (V, E), the detour distance D (u, v) is the length of a longest u – v path in G. A u – v path of length D (u, v) is called a u – v detour. For subsets A and B of V, the detour distance D (A, B) is defined as D (A, B) = min {D (x, y) : x ∈ A, y ∈ B}. A u – v path of length D (A, B) is called an A – B detour joining the sets A, B V where u ∈ A and v ∈ B. A...