R. Merris, Characteristic vertices of trees, Linear & Multilinear Algebra 22 (1987), 115-131. AMS Abstracts 8 (1987), 160. Research supported by ONR contract 85K0335. Math Reviews 89f: 05121.


Following M. Fiedler [Czech J. Math. 25 (1975), 607-618; and ibid. 619-633], the main thrust of this article concerns eigenvectors afforded by the algebraic connectivity (i.e., the smallest positive Laplacian eigenvalue) of a tree. Incidental to this work are a family of inequalities relating the coefficients of the chromatic polynomial and the Laplacian characteristic polynomial. Among the publications citing this article are

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  • Mei Lu, Huiqing Liu, and Feng Tian, Linear Algebra Appl. 402 (2005), 390-396.