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.

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...

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...

A graph G is perfect if for every induced subgraph H, the chromatic number of H equals the size of the largest complete subgraph of H, and G is Berge if no induced subgraph of G is an odd cycle of length at least 5 or the complement of one. The “strong perfect graph conjecture” (Berge, 1961) asserts that a graph is perfect if and only if it is Berge. A stronger conjecture was made recently by C...

Our proof (with Robertson and Thomas) of the strong perfect graph conjecture ran to 179 pages of dense matter; and the most impenetrable part was the final 55 pages, on what we called “wheel systems”. In this paper we give a replacement for those 55 pages, much easier and shorter, using “even pairs”. This is based on an approach of Maffray and Trotignon.

A c-ary Perfect Factor is a set of uniformly long cycles whose elements are drawn from a set of size c, in which every possible v-tuple of elements occurs exactly once. In the binary case, i.e. where c = 2, these perfect factors have previously been studied by Etzion, [2], who showed that the obvious necessary conditions for their existence are in fact sufficient. This result has recently been ...