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Tut 8

This document contains a student's submission for a tutorial on discrete mathematics. It summarizes two lemmas about minimum spanning trees (MSTs). Lemma 1 states that adding an edge to an MST creates a single cycle. Lemma 2 states that in an MST, the path between any two vertices in different partitions contains at least one edge between the partitions. The submission then provides a proof by contradiction that a given edge e must be in any MST of a graph G.

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Shriom Kumar Singh
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54 views1 page

Tut 8

This document contains a student's submission for a tutorial on discrete mathematics. It summarizes two lemmas about minimum spanning trees (MSTs). Lemma 1 states that adding an edge to an MST creates a single cycle. Lemma 2 states that in an MST, the path between any two vertices in different partitions contains at least one edge between the partitions. The submission then provides a proof by contradiction that a given edge e must be in any MST of a graph G.

Uploaded by

Shriom Kumar Singh
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Student: Shriom Kumar Singh

Entry No.:2021EE10642

Tutorial submission for COL202(Discrete Mathematics)


Tutorial-8

• Lemma 1: Adding an edge(not present in the MST) to a MST will create a single cycle in
the MST.
Proof : Say, the edge added has endpoints v and u, from connectivity property of the MST,
there existed a path between u and v, now this path (say P ) along with the added edge
creates a cycle(Go from u to v via P and from v to u via the added edge).
There will be only one such cycle (Why?), because if there is more than one cycle =⇒ there
was more than one path between u and v, now these two paths will itself form a cycle (take
path 1 from u to v and path 2 from v to u), this violates the property that the MST has no
cycles. ■
• Lemma 2: In the MST of a graph G, for a vertex u ∈ S and v ∈ S̄, the path between u and
v consists of at least one edge e ∈ E(S, S̄)
Proof : Say, this is not the case, so two cases arise:
1) All the edges in the path have there endpoints in S, this means this path can connect
only nodes in S, but this is not true as the path is connecting u and v ∈ / S, thus we have a
contradiction.
2) If all the edges are in S̄, we have a similar proof as the first case.■
Proof by contradiction: Say we have a tree T such that the given edge e ∈ / T.
Now, say, this given edge e connects has endpoints u and v. Take a new graph T ′ = T ∪ {e}, from
Lemma 1, there is a cycle in T ′ formed due to the path between u and v (say P ) in T and the
edge e.
In the path P , there must be an edge e′ ∈ E(S, S̄)(Lemma 2) and weight(e′ ) ≥ weight(e), now
P ∪ {e} forms a cycle (Lemma 1) (say C).
Claim: T ∗ = (T ′ \{e′ }) ∪ {e} is a tree.
Proof :
• There are no cycles in T ∗: As there was only one cycle in T ′ (Lemma 1), and we broke that
cycle by removing e′ .
• All the nodes are connected in T ∗, in T (which is a tree) all the paths (say Pi ’s in which e′
was a component, can now be replaced with (Pi \{e′ }) ∪ (C\{e′ }). The remaining paths stay
the same.
• T ∗ contains the same number of nodes as T : This follows from the fact that we have only
removed an edge (e′ , which connected u and v), this can only possibly exclude the vertices
u or v from T , but after adding the edge e, we have a path (C\{e′ }) between u and v =⇒
the number of nodes in T ∗ and T are the same (and T was a tree).
Assume T is a MST,(say its sum of edges are k), then for any such T (not containing e), we can
produce a tree T ∗ (using the process above) such that it’s sum of edges k − weight(e′ ) + weight(e)
is < k.
=⇒ T is not an MST, hence by contradiction, we are done. ■

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