This paper examines how the fertility of enslaved women was affected by the promise of freedom. Exploiting geographic variation in the effect of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, I demonstrate a negative correlation between fertility and the distance to freedom. This negative correlation is stronger on larger plantations but weaker when the slaveholder is a woman. A similar correlation is not pre...

In order to prove the Strong Perfect Graph Conjecture, the existence of a ”simple” property P holding for any minimal non-quasi-parity Berge graph G would really reduce the difficulty of the problem. We prove here that this property cannot be of type ”G is F-free”, where F is any fixed family of Berge graphs.

Coloring games are combinatorial games where the players alternate painting uncolored vertices of a graph one of k > 0 colors. Each different ruleset specifies that game’s coloring constraints. This paper investigates six impartial rulesets (five new), derived from previously-studied graph coloring schemes, including proper map coloring, oriented coloring, 2-distance coloring, weak coloring, an...

An acyclic edge coloring of a graph is a proper edge coloring such that there are no bichromatic cycles. The acyclic chromatic index of a graph $G$ denoted by $chi_a '(G)$ is the minimum number $k$ such that there is an acyclic edge coloring using $k$ colors. The maximum degree in $G$ denoted by $Delta(G)$, is the lower bound for $chi_a '(G)$. $P$-cuts introduced in this paper acts as a powerfu...

A 2-join is an edge cutset that naturally appears in decomposition of several classes of graphs closed under taking induced subgraphs, such as perfect graphs and claw-free graphs. In this paper we construct combinatorial polynomial time algorithms for finding a maximum weighted clique, a maximum weighted stable set and an optimal coloring for a class of perfect graphs decomposable by 2-joins: t...

The construction of joins and secant varieties is studied in the combinatorial context of monomial ideals. For ideals generated by quadratic monomials, the generators of the secant ideals are obstructions to graph colorings, and this leads to a commutative algebra version of the Strong Perfect Graph Theorem. Given any projective variety and any term order, we explore whether the initial ideal o...

A graph G = (V,E) is a unipolar graph if there exits a partition V = V1 ∪ V2 such that, V1 is a clique and V2 induces the disjoint union of cliques. The complement-closed class of generalized split graphs are those graphs G such that either G or the complement of G is unipolar. Generalized split graphs are a large subclass of perfect graphs. In fact, it has been shown that almost all C5-free (a...

A new variation of the coloring problem, μ-coloring, is defined in this paper. Given a graph G and a function μ, a μ-coloring is a coloring where each vertex v of G must receive a color at most μ(v). It is proved that μ-coloring lies between coloring and list-coloring, in the sense of generalization of problems and computational complexity. The notion of perfection is extended for μ-coloring, l...

By using recent results from graph theory, including the Strong Perfect Graph Theorem, we obtain a unifying framework for a number of tractable classes of constraint problems. These include problems with chordal microstructure; problems with chordal microstructure complement; problems with tree structure; and the “all-different” constraint. In each of these cases we show that the associated mic...