Derived graph

In the mathematical discipline of graph theory, the line graph of an undirected graph G is another graph L(G) that represents the adjacencies between edges of G. The name line graph comes from a paper by Harary & Norman (1960) although both Whitney (1932) and Krausz (1943) used the construction before this. Other terms used for the line graph include the covering graph, the derivative, the edge-to-vertex dual, the conjugate, the representative graph, and the ϑ-obrazom, as well as the edge graph, the interchange graph, the adjoint graph, and the derived graph.

Hassler Whitney (1932) proved that with one exceptional case the structure of a connected graph G can be recovered completely from its line graph. Many other properties of line graphs follow by translating the properties of the underlying graph from vertices into edges, and by Whitney's theorem the same translation can also be done in the other direction. Line graphs are claw-free, and the line graphs of bipartite graphs are perfect. Line graphs can be characterized by nine forbidden subgraphs, and can be recognized in linear time.

Various generalizations of line graphs have also been studied, including the line graphs of line graphs, line graphs of multigraphs, line graphs of hypergraphs, and line graphs of weighted graphs.

Given a graph G, its line graph L(G) is a graph such that

That is, it is the intersection graph of the edges of G, representing each edge by the set of its two endpoints.

The following figures show a graph (left, with blue vertices) and its line graph (right, with green vertices). Each vertex of the line graph is shown labeled with the pair of endpoints of the corresponding edge in the original graph. For instance, the green vertex on the right labeled 1,3 corresponds to the edge on the left between the blue vertices 1 and 3. Green vertex 1,3 is adjacent to three other green vertices: 1,4 and 1,2 (corresponding to edges sharing the endpoint 1 in the blue graph) and 4,3 (corresponding to an edge sharing the endpoint 3 in the blue graph).

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