James R. Voss

Matching preclusion and conditional matching preclusion for pancake and burnt pancake graphs

The matching preclusion number of a graph with an even number of vertices is the minimum number of edges whose deletion destroys all perfect matchings in the graph. The optimal matching preclusion sets are often precisely those which are induced by a single vertex of minimum degree. To look for obstruction sets beyond these, the conditional matching preclusion number was introduced, which is defined similarly with the additional restriction that the resulting graph has no isolated vertices. In this paper we find the matching preclusion and conditional matching preclusion numbers and classify all optimal sets for the pancake graphs and burnt pancake graphs.

Eigenvectors of Orthogonally Decomposable Functions

The eigendecomposition of quadratic forms (symmetric matrices) guaranteed by the spectral theorem is a foundational result in applied mathematics. Motivated by a shared structure found in inferenti...