Rank and biclique partitions of the complement of paths

Abstract

The problem was posed of determining the biclique partition number of the complement of a Hamiltonian path (Monson, Rees, and Pullman, Bull. Inst. Combinatorics and Appl. 14 (1995), 17–86). We define the complement of a path P, denoted P, as the complement of P in Km,n where P is a subgraph of Km,n for some m and n. We give an exact formula for the biclique partition number of the complement of a path. In particular, we solve the problem posed in [9]. We also summarize our more general results on biclique partitions of the complement of forests. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Graph Theory 27: 111–122, 1998