The Strong Perfect Graph Conjecture, suggested by Claude Berge in 1960, had a major impact on the development of graph theory over the last forty years. It has led to the definitions and study of many new classes of graphs for which the Strong Perfect Graph Conjecture has been verified. Powerful concepts and methods have been developed to prove the Strong Perfect Graph Conjecture for these spec...

In this paper we give a characterization of kernel-perfect (and of critical kernel-imperfect) arc-local tournament digraphs. As a consequence, we prove that arc-local tournament digraphs satisfy a strenghtened form of the following interesting conjecture which constitutes a bridge between kernels and perfectness in digraphs, stated by C. Berge and P. Duchet in 1982: a graph G is perfect if and ...

In this article, we present a characterization of basic graphs in terms of forbidden induced subgraphs. This class of graphs was introduced by Conforti, Cornuéjols and Vušković [3], and it plays an essential role in the announced proof of the Strong Perfect Graph Conjecture by Chudnovsky, Robertson, Seymour and Thomas [2]. Then we apply the Reducing Pseudopath Method [13] to characterize the su...

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...

Perfect graphs were defined by Claude Berge in the 1960s. They are important objects for graph theory, linear programming and combinatorial optimization. Claude Berge made a conjecture about them, that was proved by Chudnovsky, Robertson, Seymour and Thomas in 2002, and is now called the strong perfect graph theorem. This is a survey about perfect graphs, mostly focused on the strong perfect gr...

The recently announced Strong Perfect Graph Theorem states that the class of perfect graphs coincides with the class of graphs containing no induced odd cycle of length at least 5 or the complement of such a cycle. A graph in this second class is called Berge. A bull is a graph with five vertices x, a, b, c, d and five edges xa, xb, ab, ad, bc. A graph is bull-reducible if no vertex is in two b...

A graph is called weakly triangulated if it contains no chordless cycle on ve or more vertices (also called hole) and no complement of such a cycle (also called antihole). Equivalently, we can deene weakly triangulated graphs as antihole-free graphs whose induced cycles are isomorphic either to C3 or to C4. The perfection of weakly triangulated graphs was proved by Hayward 3] and generated inte...

A bull is a graph obtained by adding a pendant vertex at two vertices of a triangle. A graph is perfectly orderable if it admits an ordering such that the greedy sequential method applied on this ordering produces an optimal coloring for every induced subgraph. Chv atal conjectured that every bull-free graph with no odd hole or antihole is perfectly orderable. In a previous paper we studied the...