Discrete Mathematics and Combinatorics Commons^™

Reducing The Maximum Degree Of A Graph By Deleting Vertices: The Extremal Cases, Peter Borg, Kurt Fenech

Theory and Applications of Graphs

Let λ(G) denote the smallest number of vertices that can be removed from a non-empty graph G so that the resulting graph has a smaller maximum degree. In a recent paper, we proved that if n is the number of vertices of G,k is the maximum degree of G, and t is the number of vertices of degree k, then λ: (G) ≤ n+(k-1)t}{2k}. We also showed that λ (G) ≤ \frac{n}{k+1} if G is a tree. In this paper, we provide a new proof of the first bound and use it to determine the graphs that …