Correspondence between Sylvester, Petersen, Hilbert and Klein on invariants and the factorisation of graphs 1889--1891 (Q1198641)

Julius Petersen's work of 1891 on the factorization of graphs marks a beginning of graph-theoretic studies though its importance as such was not recognized until forty years later. The original paper came from a mix of collaboration and competitive race between Petersen and J. J. Sylvester. Of the 30 Sylvester letters to Petersen in Copenhagen, the author has given full transcriptions of 27 here. Unfortunately there is only the one side of this correspondence, but the story is supplemented by transcriptions or, in the case of the German correspondents, translations (not all of them full) of 20 other letters between David Hilbert and Felix Klein, Petersen and Klein, Sylvester and Klein, and Hilbert and Petersen. The author extensively annotates all the letters. Hilbert and Klein were involved in the incident of Arthur Cayley's faulty alternative proof of an early finite basis theorem for invariants of binary forms by Hilbert. This topic was a starting point for the Petersen-Sylvester graph-theoretic work but it is a fascinating footnote that Cayley's paper, in spite of everyone, including the author, knowing of its falseness, was published as it stood (though not in his collected papers). Two letters, one each of Sylvester's and Petersen's, are photographically reproduced.