A New Proof of Cayley’s Formula
for Labeled Spanning Trees
M. Ariannejad, M. Emami
Department of Mathematics, University of Zanjan
Zanjan, I. R. Iran
Abstract
Cayleys’s formula for enumerating spanning trees in complete graphs is one of the
main theorems in this topic. In this note based on a new recursive method for
the enumeration of spanning trees and meanwhile enumerating spanning trees in
a kind of complete multigraph, a new proof for the Cayley’s formula is given. A
generalization of this formula is also presented.
Keywords: Cayleys’s formula, Spanning tree.
1 Introduction
One of the classical topics in any graph theory texts is enumerating spanning
trees in diverse kinds of graphs. Let G be a given graph. By τ (G) we denote
the total number of spanning trees in G. We also denote the complete simple
graph with n vertex by K
n
. Cayley’s formula [1] is one of the best computa-
tions in this title:
Theorem 1.1 (Cayley’s Formula[1889]) τ (K
n
)= n
n-2
.
There is also a simple recursive formula for computing the number of spanning
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
Electronic Notes in Discrete Mathematics 45 (2014) 99–102
1571-0653/$ – see front matter © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
www.elsevier.com/locate/endm
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.endm.2013.11.019