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 is clique-perfect if the cardinality of a maximum cliqueindependent set of H is equal to the cardinality of a minimum cliquetransversal of H, for every induced subgraph H of G. When equality holds for every clique subgraph of G, the graph is c–clique-perfect. A graph G is K-perfect when its clique graph K(G) is perfect. In this work, relations are described among the classes of perfec...

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.

Let c : C → X×X be a correspondence with C and X quasi-projective schemes over an algebraically closed field k. We show that if u` : c ∗ 1Q` → c2Q` is an action defined by the localized Chern classes of a c2-perfect complex of vector bundles on C, where ` is a prime invertible in k, then the local terms of u` are given by the class of an algebraic cycle independent of `. We also prove some rela...

The complement of a graph G is denoted by G. χ(G) denotes the chromatic number and ω(G) the clique number of G. The cycles of odd length at least five are called odd holes and the complements of odd holes are called odd anti-holes. A graph G is called perfect if, for each induced subgraph G of G, χ(G) = ω(G). Classical examples of perfect graphs consist of bipartite graphs, chordal graphs and c...

The Strong Perfect Graph Conjecture (SPGC) was certainly one of the most challenging conjectures in graph theory. During more than four decades, numerous attempts were made to solve it, by combinatorial methods, by linear algebraic methods, or by polyhedral methods. The rst of these three approaches yielded the rst (and to date only) proof of the SPGC; the other two remain promising to consider...