Although it is known that reachability in undirected finite graphs can be expressed by an existential monadic second-order sentence, our main result is that this is not the case for directed finite graphs (even in the presence of certain “built-in” relations, such as the successor relation). The proof makes use of Ehrenfeucht-Frai’sse games, along with probabilistic arguments. However, we show ...

We present a powerful and versatile new sufficient condition for the second player (the “duplicator”) to have a winning strategy in an Ehrenfeucht-Fra’isst game on graphs. We accomplish two things with this technique. First, we give a simpler and much easier-to-understand proof of Ajtai and Fagin’s result that reachability in directed finite graphs is not in monadic NP. (Monadic NP, otherwise k...

Mycielski introduced a new graph transformation μ(G) for graph G, which is called the Mycielskian of G. A graph G is super connected or simply super-κ (resp. super edge connected or super-λ), if every minimum vertex cut (resp. minimum edge cut) isolates a vertex of G. In this paper, we show that for a connected graph G with |V (G)| ≥ 2, μ(G) is super-κ if and only if δ(G) < 2κ(G), and μ(G) is s...

In this work we give a new lower bound on the chromatic number of a Mycielski graph Mi. The result exploits a mapping between the coloring problem and a multiprocessor task scheduling problem. The tightness of the bound is proved for i = 1; : : : ; 8. c © 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

For a graph G, let M(G) denote the Mycielski graph of G. The t-th iterated Mycielski graph of G, M(G), is defined recursively by M0(G) = G and M(G)= M(Mt−1(G)) for t ≥ 1. Let χc(G) denote the circular chromatic number of G. We prove two main results: 1) Assume G has a universal vertex x, then χc(M(G)) = χ(M(G)) if χc(G − x) > χ(G − x) − 1/2 and G is not a star, otherwise χc(M(G)) = χ(M(G)) − 1/...

We prove that the chromatic Ramsey number of every odd wheel W2k+1, k ≥ 2 is 14. That is, for every odd wheel W2k+1, there exists a 14-chromatic graph F such that when the edges of F are two-coloured, there is a monochromatic copy of W2k+1 in F , and no graph F with chromatic number 13 has the same property. We ask whether a natural extension of odd wheels to the family of generalized Mycielski...

Let n(G) denote the number of vertices of a graph G and let (G) be the independence number of G, the maximum number of pairwise nonadjacent vertices of G. The Hall ratio of a graph G is defined by (G)=max { n(H) (H) : H ⊆ G } , where the maximum is taken over all induced subgraphs H of G. It is obvious that every graph G satisfies (G) (G) (G) where and denote the clique number and the chromatic...

Let G = (V, E) be a simple connected graph, then the basis number of is denoted by b(G) and defined least positive integer k such that graph has − fold for it cycle space. In this paper we studied Mycielski’s some cog-special graphs, compute cog-path cog-cycle cog-star cog-wheel graph.

We investigate the local chromatic number of shift graphs and prove that it is close to their chromatic number. This implies that the gap between the directed local chromatic number of an oriented graph and the local chromatic number of the underlying undirected graph can be arbitrarily large. We also investigate the minimum possible directed local chromatic number of oriented versions of “topo...