Permanental roots and the star degree of a graph (Q802573)

Let A be the adjacency matrix of a graph G and D a diagonal matrix whose entries are the degrees of the vertices of G. Let \(B=A+D\). Define a pendant star of G as a maximal subgraph formed by pendant edges all incident with the same vertex and call the number of pendant edges of the star S the degree of S. The star degree of G is the sum of the degrees of all pendant stars (or 0 if G has none). The main result is that the star degree of G is equal to the multiplicity of root 1 of per(xI-B). For bipartite graphs, the same statement holds with \(L=D-A\) instead of B.