We consider the maximum weight perfectly matchable subgraph problemon a bipartite graph G=(UV,E) with respect to given nonnegativeweights of its edges. We show that G has a perfect matching if andonly if some vector indexed by the nodes in UV is a base of anextended polymatroid associated with a submodular function definedon the subsets of UV. The dual problem of the separation problemfor the extended polymatroid is transformed to the special maximumflow problem on G. In this paper, we give a linear programmingformulation for the maximum weight perfectly matchable subgraphproblem and propose an O(n 3) algorithm to solve it.

Let G be a simple undirected graph. The energy E(G) of G is the sum of the absolute values of the eigenvalues of the adjacent matrix of G, and the Hosoya index Z(G) of G is the total number of matchings in G. A tree is called a nonconjugated tree if it contains no perfect matching. Recently, Ou [‘Maximal Hosoya index and extremal acyclic molecular graphs without perfect matching’, Appl. Math. Lett.19 (2006), 652–656] determined the unique element which is maximal with respect to Z(G) among the family of nonconjugated n-vertex trees in the case of even n. In this paper, we provide a counterexample to Ou’s results. Then we determine the unique maximal element with respect to E(G) as well as Z(G) among the family of nonconjugated n-vertex trees for the case when n is even. As corollaries, we determine the maximal element with respect to E(G) as well as Z(G) among the family of nonconjugated chemical trees on n vertices, when n is even.

Let $\tau$ be a partition of the positive integer $n$. A partition of the set $\{1,2,\dots,n\}$ is said to be of type $\tau$ if the sizes of its classes form the partition $\tau$ of $n$. It is known that the semigroup $S(\tau)$, generated by all the transformations with kernels of type $\tau$, is idempotent generated. When $\tau$ has a unique non-singleton class of size $d$, the difficult Middle Levels Conjecture of combinatorics obstructs the application of known techniques for determining the rank and idempotent rank of $S(\tau)$. We further develop existing techniques, associating with a subset $U$ of the set of all idempotents of $S(\tau)$ with kernels of type $\tau$ a directed graph $D(U)$; the directed graph $D(U)$ is strongly connected if and only if $U$ is a generating set for $S(\tau)$, a result which leads to a proof if the fact that the rank and the idempotent rank of $S(\tau)$ are both equal to

$$ \max\biggl\{\binom{n}{d},\binom{n}{d+1}\biggr\}. $$

AMS 2000 Mathematics subject classification: Primary 20M20; 05A18; 05A17; 05C20