Term of Award

Spring 2010

Degree Name

Master of Science in Mathematics (M.S.)

Document Type and Release Option

Thesis (open access)

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Department

Department of Mathematical Sciences

Committee Chair

Hua Wang

Committee Member 1

Goran Lesaja

Committee Member 2

Yan Wu

Abstract

The biochemical community has been using graphical (topological, chemical) indices in the study of Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationships (QSAR) and Quantitative Structure-Property Relationships (QSPR), as they have been shown to have strong correlations with the chemical properties of certain chemical compounds (i.e. boiling point, surface area, etc.). We examine some of these chemical indices and closely related pure graph theoretical indices: the Randić index, the Wiener index, the degree distance, and the number of subtrees. We find which structure will maximize the Randić index of a class of graphs known as cacti, and we find a functional relationship between the Wiener index and the degree distance for several types of graphs. We also develop an algorithm to find the structure that maximizes the number of subtrees of trees, a characterization of the second maximal tree may also follow as an immediate result of this algorithm.

Research Data and Supplementary Material

No

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