Computing the number of h-edge spanning forests in complete bipartite graphs

Rebecca J Stones (1)

1 School of Mathematical Sciences [Clayton]

Let fm,n,h be the number of spanning forests with h edges in the complete bipartite graph Km,n. Kirchhoff\textquoterights Matrix Tree Theorem implies fm,n,m+n-1=mn-1 nm-1 when m ≥1 and n ≥1, since fm,n,m+n-1 is the number of spanning trees in Km,n. In this paper, we give an algorithm for computing fm,n,h for general m,n,h. We implement this algorithm and use it to compute all non-zero fm,n,h when m ≤50 and n ≤50 in under 2 days.

Domaines: Mathématique discrète [cs.DM]

Rebecca J Stones. Computing the number of h-edge spanning forests in complete bipartite graphs. Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science, 2014, Vol. 16 no. 1 (1), pp.313--326. ⟨10.46298/dmtcs.1248⟩. ⟨hal-01179216⟩