Directed cycle detection 2026-10-07
Decide whether a directed graph has a nonempty directed cycle; self-loops count. This problem is NL-complete. Membership guesses a returning walk of at most the vertex count. For hardness, layer a reachability instance into layers with wait arcs, then add only the backward edge from the target in the last layer to the source in the first. The otherwise acyclic layering has a cycle exactly when the original target is reachable. Zero-length paths must not be treated as cycles.
Edge of a graph Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-03
Flow balance Created 2026-10-06 Updated 2026-10-07
A flow balance prescribes net outgoing minus incoming flow at a vertex. Positive is supply and negative is demand; zero is ordinary flow conservation. Summing all balances requires total supply to equal total demand. In a directed graph, these equations are represented by the oriented incidence matrix.
Orientation of a graph 2026-10-07
Outdegree 2026-10-07
The number of edges of a directed graph directed away from a given vertex. Assigning directions to undirected edges is an orientation of a graph.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2015 iii Paper 23 4 d Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-06
Take a rooted directed graph with one root and one terminal vertex , with its sole edge . Let have a root and two terminal vertices , with edges and . The relationis a bisimulation. Each root move can be matched by a root move ending in a related terminal vertex. At all related terminal pairs there are no further edges, so both matching conditions are vacuous. Yet the directed graphs have two and three vertices and cannot be isomorphic. Bisimilarity need not preserve the number of successors.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2015 iii Paper 38 3 a Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-06
Choose the oriented incidence matrix convention with at an edge's tail and at its head. Let be net supply, so . The uncapacitated minimum-cost flow problem on a finite directed graph isor . Negative denotes net demand. Costs may have either sign; the problem can be infeasible or unbounded.
For vertex network dual potentials , the optimization Lagrangian isThe infimum over is finite exactly when every network reduced cost is nonnegative. Thus the Lagrangian dual problem and complementary slackness areA feasible flow and feasible network dual potentials satisfying these equalities have equal costs and are optimal by weak duality.
If the underlying undirected graph is connected, deleting one redundant balance row makes the oriented incidence matrix have rank . A set of independent edge columns is exactly a spanning tree. Set all non-tree flows to zero, solve the tree balances, and check nonnegativity to obtain a basic feasible solution. Basic tree edges may have zero flow, which is degeneracy in linear programming. Requiring on tree edges determines network dual potentials up to a common additive constant. If every non-tree network reduced cost is nonnegative, the tree flow is optimal. This is the basis of the network simplex algorithm. If the graph is disconnected, solve the balances separately in each component; each component must have total net supply zero and uses its own spanning tree.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2017 ib Paper 4 20H a Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-05
A finite flow network is a directed graph with distinguished source , sink , and nonnegative finite flow network edge capacities on its directed edges. A feasible flow consists of numbers satisfyingThe second condition is flow conservation; absent edges contribute zero. The strength of a flow is its net outflow from the source,which equals net inflow to the sink by summing flow conservation over the other vertices. The maximum flow problem isNo assumption that a capacity-saturating flow at the source is feasible downstream is made. On a finite network a maximum exists, because the constraints define a nonempty compact set of edge flows and the objective is continuous.
Skeleton of a directed graph Created 2026-10-05 Updated 2026-10-06
The skeleton of a directed graph is the undirected graph obtained by replacing every directed edge with an undirected edge and forgetting its orientation. In causal structure learning, the PC algorithm first recovers this adjacency structure before learning orientations.