Intersection of Longest Paths in a Graph ?

Susanna F. de Rezende 1 Cristina G. Fernandes 1

Daniel M. Martin 2 Yoshiko Wakabayashi 1
Instituto de Matematica e Estatstica, Universidade de Sao Paulo, Brazil 1

Universidade Federal do ABC, Brazil 2

Abstract
In 1966, Gallai asked whether every connected graph has a vertex that is common
to all its longest paths. The answer to this question is negative. We prove that
the answer is positive for outerplanar graphs. Another related question was raised
in 1995 at the British Combinatorial Conference: Do any three longest paths in a
connected graph have a vertex in common? We prove that, in a connected graph in
which all non-trivial blocks are Hamiltonian, any three of its longest paths have a
common vertex. Both of these results strengthen a recent result by Axenovich.
Keywords: longest path, intersection of longest paths, outerplanar graph.

1 Introduction
In 1966, during a coloquium on graph theory, Gallai [4] asked whether every
connected graph has a vertex that appears in all its longest paths. A few years
? This research was partially supported by CNPq.
1
Email: {susanna,cris,yw}@ime.usp.br
2
Email: daniel.martin@ufabc.edu.br
later, Walther [7] answered this question negatively by exhibiting a counter-
example on 25 vertices. Later, Walther [8] and Zamfirescu [9] independently
found a smaller counterexample on 12 vertices (see Figure 1).

Fig. 1. The graph of Walther and Zamfirescu.

On the other hand, it is easy to prove that the answer is positive for trees.
In 1990, Klavzar and Petkovsek [5] proved that the answer is also positive for
split graphs, cacti, and some other classes of graphs. More recently, in 2004,
Balister, Gyori, Lehel, and Schelp [3] established a similar result for the class
of circular arc graphs. In this paper we prove the following result.
Theorem 1.1 If G is a connected outerplanar graph, then G has a vertex
common to all its longest paths.
Since non-empty intersection of all longest paths seems to be a property
exhibited by few classes of graphs, it is natural to consider the intersection
of a smaller number of longest paths. In this case, while it is easy to prove
that every two longest paths share a common vertex, for three longest paths, a
satisfactory answer is not known. In fact, the following problem [1,10] remains
open.
Problem 1.2 Do any three longest paths in a connected graph share a com-
mon vertex?
The only known progress on Problem 1.2, excluding those on all longest
paths mentioned above, was obtained by Axenovich [2], who proved the fol-
lowing result.
Theorem 1.3 (Axenovich, 2009) If G is a connected outerplanar graph,
then any three of its longest paths have a common vertex.
In Section 3, we prove the following more general result.
Theorem 1.4 If G is a connected graph in which all non-trivial blocks are
Hamiltonian, then any three of its longest paths have a common vertex.
Note that both Theorems 1.1 and 1.4 generalize Axenovichs result, each
in a different way.
 In this paper, all graphs considered are undirected and simple. A graph is
outerplanar if it has an embedding in the plane such that all vertices belong
to the boundary of its outer face (the unbounded face).
If P is a path, then kP k denotes its length (number of edges), and P 1
denotes the reverse of P . If x and y are vertices of a cycle C embedded in the
plane, we denote by Cx,y the section of C that goes clockwise from x to y.
If B is a non-trivial block of a graph G, then we say that a non-trivial path
in G is a pending path (of B) if it intersects B in precisely one of its extremes,
which we call its origin.

2 Longest Paths in Outerplanar Graphs

In this section we present the proof of Theorem 1.1. For that, we use the
following result, obtained by Klavzar and Petkovsek [5].
Proposition 2.1 (Klavzar and Petkovsek, 1990) Let G be a connected
graph. Then all longest paths in G have a common vertex if and only if for
every block B of G all longest paths in G which use at least one edge of B
have a common vertex.
Note that the above result implies that if G is a cactus, then all longest
paths in G have a common vertex. A larger class of graphs containing the
cacti is the class of outerplanar graphs. This class is captured by Theorem 1.1.

Proof of Theorem 1.1. Let G be a graph as in the statement of Theorem 1.1.

Let B be an arbitrary block of G and PB be the set of the longest paths in G
which use at least one edge of B. By Proposition 2.1, it suffices to prove that
the paths in PB have a common vertex.
If B is a trivial block, then it is immediate that the paths in PB have
a common vertex. So now suppose B is a non-trivial block. Let C be a
Hamiltonian cycle in B, and let R? be a longest pending path (of B). Denote
by v the origin of R? . We shall prove that all paths in PB contain v.
Suppose there is a path P in PB that does not contain v. Consider an
outerplanar embedding of G. Let x be a vertex in V (P ) V (B) such that
kCx,v k is minimum, and let y be a vertex in V (P ) V (B) such that kCv,y k is
minimum. Note that x 6= y; otherwise, P would intersect B only at x.
Now let z be a vertex such that xz E(P ) E(B) and kCy,z k is minimum.
Suppose y = z (see Figure 2(a)). In this case, consider the path P 0 obtained
from P by substituting the edge xy by the path Cx,y , i.e., P 0 = (P xy)
Cx,y . Observe that P 0 is in fact a path, because Cx,y only intersects P at the
vertices x and y. So kP 0 k = kP xyk + kCx,y k = kP k 1 + kCx,v k + kCv,y k.
But kCx,v k 1 and kCv,y k 1. Therefore, kP 0 k > kP k, which contradicts
the fact that P is a longest path.
x
x
P0 v R
P z
P0 v
P
(a) y (b)
y=z
R
Fig. 2. Examples of the cases y = z and y 6= z respectively.

Now suppose y 6= z (see Figure 2(b)). Let P1 and P2 be the sections of P

such that P = P1 P2 , V (P1 ) V (P2 ) = {z}, x V (P1 ) and y V (P2 ).
Since G is outerplanar, P2 uses only vertices of Cy,z and possibly a pending
path, say R. Now, consider the path P 0 = P1 Cv,z 1
R? . Then, kP 0 k =
kP1 k + kCv,y k + kCy,z k + kR? k. Since kCy,z k kP2 k kRk, kR? k kRk, and
kCv,y k > 0, then kP 0 k > kP1 k + kP2 k = kP k, a contradiction to the fact that
P is a longest path. Thus P must contain v, and this completes the proof. 2

3 Intersection of Three Longest Paths

In this section we focus on the intersection of three longest paths. Theorem 1.4
shows a class of graphs for which any three longest paths have a common
vertex. In particular, this class includes the outerplanar graphs.

Sketch of the proof of Theorem 1.4. Let P be a set of three longest paths
in G. It can be shown that there is a block B of G that contains at least one
vertex of each path in P. If one of the paths in P contains all vertices of B,
then the result follows easily. Thus we can assume B is non-trivial and all
paths in P use two pending paths of B.
Henceforth, we shall consider only pending paths of B that are contained
in the paths of P. If all these pending paths together intersect B in only two
vertices, then the result is obvious. So, let v1 , v2 and v3 be origins of three
disjoint pending paths that are as long as possible.
A longest pending path of B that has vi as its origin will be called a vi -
pending path. Suppose a vi -pending path is at least as long as a vj -pending
path if i < j. Let C be a Hamiltonian cycle in B embedded in the plane in
such a way that v1 , v2 and v3 appear clockwise in C.
Case 1: There is at most one path in P containing both a v1 -pending path
and a v2 -pending path.
Let Pa be a path in P that contains a v1 -pending path, and its other
pending path is as long as possible. Let Pc be a path in P that does not
contain a v1 -pending path, and let Pb be the remaining path in P.
For i {1, 2, 3}, let Ri be a vi -pending path, and for x {a, b, c}, denote
by Tx and Tx0 the two pending paths contained in Px . Thus, we have

kR1 k + kR2 k kTa k + kTa0 k,

(1) kR1 k + kR3 k kTb k + kTb0 k,
kR2 k + kR3 k kTc k + kTc0 k.

Now consider the paths

Qa = R21 Cv2 ,v3 Cv3 ,v1 R1 ,

Qb = R11 Cv1 ,v2 Cv2 ,v3 R3 ,
Qc = R31 Cv3 ,v1 Cv1 ,v2 R2 .

Since Pa , Pb , Pc are longest paths, it follows that

(2) kPx k kQx k, for x {a, b, c}.

For a path Px , let C(Px ) denote the subgraph obtained from Px by remov-
ing all vertices not in C. Observe that C(Px ) must be a path. Combining the
fact that kPx k = kTx k + kC(Px )k + kTx0 k with (1) and (2), we obtain

kC(Pa )k kCv2 ,v3 k + kCv3 ,v1 k,

kC(Pb )k kCv1 ,v2 k + kCv2 ,v3 k,
kC(Pc )k kCv3 ,v1 k + kCv1 ,v2 k.

Adding both sides of the last three inequalities yields

kC(Pa )k + kC(Pb )k + kC(Pc )k 2kCk.

Thus, there must exist a vertex common to Pa , Pb and Pc .

Case 2: There are (exactly) two paths in P containing both a v1 -pending
path and a v2 -pending path.
Due to space constraints we omit the proof of this case. 2
4 Concluding Remarks
A natural question concerning Theorem 1.4 is whether one can replace three
longest paths for all longest paths and guarantee that the correspond-
ing statement holds. The answer is no, as shown by the graph in Figure 1.
Skupien [6], in 1996, proved a result related to this: for every k 7, there is a
connected graph in which some k longest paths have no common vertex, but
every k 1 longest paths have a common vertex.
It would be interesting to find other classes of graphs for which all (or any
three) longest paths have a common vertex. Also, in view of the result of
Skupien [6], it would be interesting to either prove or disprove that every six
(or less) longest paths in a connected graph have a common vertex. Other
related open problems were proposed by Zamfirescu [10].

References

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graphs, Combin. Probab. Comput. 13 (2004), pp. 311317.
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[6] Skupien, Z., Smallest sets of longest paths with empty intersection, Combin.
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