scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1405497

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Publication:4938474





A perfect matching of a graph \(G\) is a subset of the edges of \(G\) with the property that each vertex in \(G\) belongs to precisely one edge in the subset. This comprehensive paper is concerned with the problem of counting and enumerating the perfect matchings in a graph. This problem has important applications in physics and chemistry, and was first studied by researchers in these areas in the 1930s. For general graphs it is computationally hard to answer this problem. However, for many infinite families of special graphs the number of perfect matchings is given by compellingly simple formulae. In particular, over the past ten years a great many families of this kind have been discovered, and while there is no single unified result that encompasses all of them, many of these families resemble one another, both in terms of the form of the results and in terms of the methods that have been useful in proving them. The paper focuses on a list of thirty-two problems in enumeration of perfect matchings, the first twenty of which were presented in a lecture by the author at the Mathematical Sciences Research Unit in 1996. The author summarises progress on these problems and includes pointers to both the printed and on-line literature relating to them. Roughly half of the original twenty problems were solved by participants in the MSRI Workshop on Combinatorics, their students, and others, between 1996 and 1999. Many of the problems are stated in terms of tilings of various regions in the plane. The paper concludes with a set of twelve new open problems. Updates on the status of these problems can be found at \url{http://math.wisc.edu/~propp/update.ps.gz}. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0927.00011].




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