View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE Received: 27 October 2016 Revised: 31 October 2017 Accepted: 20 November 2017 provided by Ghent University Academic Bibliography DOI: 10.1002/jgt.22228 ARTICLE Every graph occurs as an induced subgraph of some hypohamiltonian graph Carol T. Zamfirescu1 Tudor I. Zamfirescu2,3,4 1 Department of Applied Mathematics, Com- Abstract puter Science and Statistics, Ghent University, Krijgslaan 281 - S9, 9000 Ghent, Belgium We prove the titular statement. This settles a problem 2Fachbereich Mathematik, Universität of Chvátal from 1973 and encompasses earlier results Dortmund, 44221 Dortmund, Germany of Thomassen, who showed it for 3, and Collier and 3 “Simion Stoilow” Institute of Mathematics, Schmeichel, who proved it for bipartite graphs. We also Roumanian Academy, Bucharest, Roumania show that for every outerplanar graph there exists a pla- 4College of Mathematics and Information Science, Hebei Normal University, 050024 nar hypohamiltonian graph containing it as an induced Shijiazhuang, P.R. China subgraph. Correspondence Carol T. Zamfirescu, Department of KEYWORDS Applied Mathematics, Computer Sci- hypohamiltonian, induced subgraph ence and Statistics, Ghent University, Krijgslaan 281 - S9, 9000 Ghent, Belgium. MSC 2010. Email: czamfi
[email protected] 05C10, 05C45, 05C60 Funding information Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek 1 INTRODUCTION Consider a non-hamiltonian graph . We call hypohamiltonian if for every vertex in , the graph − is hamiltonian. In similar spirit, is said to be almost hypohamiltonian if there exists a vertex in , which we will call exceptional, such that − is non-hamiltonian, and for any vertex ≠ in , the graph − is hamiltonian. For an overview of results on hypohamiltonicity till 1993, see the survey by Holton and Sheehan [7].