We discuss a nested collection of three superclasses of perfect graphs: near-perfect, rank-perfect, and weakly rank-perfect graphs. For that we start with the description of the stable set polytope for perfect graphs and allow stepwise more general facets for the stable set polytopes of the graphs in each superclass. Membership in those three classes indicates how far a graph is away from being...

‎in this paper‎, ‎we give some necessary conditions for an $r$-partite graph such that the edge ring of the graph is cohen-macaulay‎. ‎it is proved that if there exists a cover of an $r$-partite cohen-macaulay graph by disjoint cliques of size $r$‎, ‎then such a cover is unique‎.

Let c(F) be the number of perfect pairs of F and c(G) be the maximum of c(F) over all (near-) one-factorizations F of G. Wagner showed that for odd n, c(Kn) ≥ n∗φ(n) 2 and for m and n which are odd and co-prime to each other, c(Kmn) ≥ 2 ∗ c(Km) ∗ c(Kn). In this note, we establish that both these results are equivalent in the sense that they both give rise to the same lower bound.

V. Chv atal proved that no minimal imperfect graph has a small transversal, that is, a set of vertices of cardinality at most + ! 1 which meets every !-clique and every -stable set. In this paper we prove that a slight generalization of this notion of small transversal leads to a conjecture which is as strong as Berge's Strong Perfect Graph Conjecture for a very large class of graphs, although ...

In order to prove the Strong Perfect Graph Conjecture, the existence of a ”simple” property P holding for any minimal non-quasi-parity Berge graph G would really reduce the difficulty of the problem. We prove here that this property cannot be of type ”G is F-free”, where F is any fixed family of Berge graphs.

The richest class of t-perfect graphs known so far consists of the graphs with no so-called odd-K4. Clearly, these graphs have the special property that they are hereditary t-perfect in the sense that every subgraph is also t-perfect, but they are not the only ones. In this paper we characterize hereditary t-perfect graphs by showing that any non–t-perfect graph contains a non–tperfect subdivis...

A graph is Berge if no induced subgraph of it is an odd cycle of length at least five or the complement of one. In joint work with Robertson, Seymour, and Thomas we recently proved the Strong Perfect Graph Theorem, which was a conjecture about the chromatic number of Berge graphs. The proof consisted of showing that every Berge graph either belongs to one of a few basic classes, or admits one o...

Our proof (with Robertson and Thomas) of the strong perfect graph conjecture ran to 179 pages of dense matter; and the most impenetrable part was the final 55 pages, on what we called “wheel systems”. In this paper we give a replacement for those 55 pages, much easier and shorter, using “even pairs”. This is based on an approach of Maffray and Trotignon.

The theory of perfect graphs relates the concept of graph colorings to the concept of cliques. In this paper, we introduce the concept of a perfect graph as well as a number of graph classes that are always perfect. We next introduce both theWeak Perfect Graph Theorem and the Strong Perfect Graph Theorem and provide a proof of the Weak Perfect Graph Theorem. We also demonstrate an application o...