Fundamentals of Graph Theory

It is not necessary to persuade the reader that graphs are one of the basic mathematical objects with which the present book is concerned. Chap. 2 gave a general conceptual basis for the use of graphs for representing the topology of a molecule. In Chap. 3 we got acquainted with a variety of types of molecular graphs. The present chapter will, finally, provide a precise mathematical characterization of a graph. We shall list here a number of additional graph-theoretical definitions and mention a few basic properties of graphs.