V. Chv atal proved that no minimal imperfect graph has a small transversal, that is, a set of vertices of cardinality at most + ! 1 which meets every !-clique and every -stable set. In this paper we prove that a slight generalization of this notion of small transversal leads to a conjecture which is as strong as Berge's Strong Perfect Graph Conjecture for a very large class of graphs, although ...

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.

A graph is Berge if no induced subgraph of it is an odd cycle of length at least five or the complement of one. In joint work with Robertson, Seymour, and Thomas we recently proved the Strong Perfect Graph Theorem, which was a conjecture about the chromatic number of Berge graphs. The proof consisted of showing that every Berge graph either belongs to one of a few basic classes, or admits one o...

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.

The theory of perfect graphs relates the concept of graph colorings to the concept of cliques. In this paper, we introduce the concept of a perfect graph as well as a number of graph classes that are always perfect. We next introduce both theWeak Perfect Graph Theorem and the Strong Perfect Graph Theorem and provide a proof of the Weak Perfect Graph Theorem. We also demonstrate an application o...

We give various reformulations of the Strong Perfect Graph Conjecture, based on a study of forced coloring procedures, uniquely colorable subgraphs and ! ? 1-cliques in minimal imperfect graphs.

We generalize the notion of Jacobson graphs into $n$-array columns called $n$-array Jacobson graphs and determine their connectivities and diameters. Also, we will study forbidden structures of these graphs and determine when an $n$-array Jacobson graph is planar, outer planar, projective, perfect or domination perfect.

Let $G=(V,E)$ be a simple connected graph. A perfect matching (or Kekul'e structure in chemical literature) of $G$ is a set of disjoint edges which covers all vertices of $G$. The anti-forcing number of $G$ is the smallest number of edges such that the remaining graph obtained by deleting these edges has a unique perfect matching and is denoted by $af(G)$. In this paper we consider some specifi...