Clique separator decomposition introduced by Tarjan and Whitesides is one of the most important graph decompositions. A graph is an atom if it has no clique separator. A hole is a chordless cycle with at least five vertices, and an antihole is the complement graph of a hole. A graph is weakly chordal if it is holeand antihole-free. K4−e is also called diamond. Paraglider has five vertices four ...

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...

It is shown that when a special vertex stretching is applied to a graph, the cochordal cover number of the graph increases exactly by one, as it happens to its induced matching number and (Castelnuovo-Mumford) regularity. As a consequence, it is shown that the induced matching number and cochordal cover number of a special vertex stretching of a graph G are equal provided G is well-covered bipa...

Let H denote a finite simple hypergraph. The cover ideal of H, denoted by J = J(H), is the monomial ideal whose minimal generators correspond to the minimal vertex covers of H. We give an algebraic method for determining the chromatic number of H, proving that it is equivalent to a monomial ideal membership problem involving powers of J . Furthermore, we study the sets Ass(R/Js) by exploring th...

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...

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...

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...

The pre-coloring extension problem consists, given a graph G and a subset of nodes to which some colors are already assigned, in finding a coloring of G with the minimum number of colors which respects the pre-coloring assignment. This can be reduced to the usual coloring problem on a certain contracted graph. We prove that pre-coloring extension is polynomial for complements of Meyniel graphs....

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...

The pre-coloring extension problem consists, given a graph G and a subset of nodes to which some colors are already assigned, in nding a coloring of G with the minimum number of colors which respects the pre-coloring assignment. This can be reduced to the usual coloring problem on a certain contracted graph. We prove that pre-coloring extension is polynomial for complements of Meyniel graphs. W...