Decompositions and Graceful Labelings ( Supplemental Material for Intro to Graph Theory )

A graph decomposition is a particular problem in the field of combinatorial designs (see Wallis [22] for more information on design theory). A graph decomposition of a graph H is a partition of the edge set of H . In this case, the graph H is called the host for the decomposition. Most graph decomposition problems are concerned with the case where every part of the partition is isomorphic to a single graph G. In this case, we refer to the graph G as the prototype for the decomposition. Further, we refer to the parts of the partition as blocks. As an example, consider the host graph Q3 as shown in Figure 1. In this case, we want to find a decomposition of Q3 into isomorphic copies of the path on three vertices, P3. We label the vertices of P3 as an ordered triple (a, b, c). where ab and bc are the edges of P3. The required blocks in the decompositions are (0, 2, 4), (1, 0, 6), (1, 3, 2), (1, 7, 5), (3, 5, 4), and (4, 6, 7). Usually, the goal of a combinatorial design is to determine whether the particular design is possible. The same is true for graph decompositions. Namely, given a host graph H and a prototype G, determine whether there exist a decomposition of H into isomorphic copies of G. Often, this is a difficult problem. In fact, there are entire books written on the subject (for