Let $G$ be a simple connected graph with $n$ vertices and $m$ edges and $d_{1}\geq d_{2}\geq \cdots \geq d_{n}>0$ its sequence of vertex degrees. If $\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}_{1}\geq \unicode[STIX]{x1D707}_{2}\geq \cdots \geq \unicode[STIX]{x1D707}_{n-1}>\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}_{n}=0$ are the Laplacian eigenvalues of $G$, then the Kirchhoff index of $G$ is $\mathit{Kf}(G)=n\sum _{i=1}^{n-1}\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}_{i}^{-1}$. We prove some new lower bounds for $\mathit{Kf}(G)$ in terms of some of the parameters $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E5}=d_{1}$, $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E5}_{2}=d_{2}$, $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E5}_{3}=d_{3}$, $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FF}=d_{n}$, $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FF}_{2}=d_{n-1}$ and the topological index $\mathit{NK}=\prod _{i=1}^{n}d_{i}$.

The classical first and second Zagreb indices of a graph $G$ are defined as $M_{1}(G)=\sum _{v\in V(G)}d(v)^{2}$ and $M_{2}(G)=\sum _{e=uv\in E(G)}d(u)d(v),$ where $d(v)$ is the degree of the vertex $v$ of $G.$ Recently, Furtula et al. [‘On difference of Zagreb indices’, Discrete Appl. Math.178 (2014), 83–88] studied the difference of $M_{1}$ and $M_{2},$ and showed that this difference is closely related to the vertex-degree-based invariant $RM_{2}(G)=\sum _{e=uv\in E(G)}[d(u)-1][d(v)-1]$, the reduced second Zagreb index. In this paper, we present sharp bounds for the reduced second Zagreb index, given the matching number, independence number and vertex connectivity, and we also completely determine the extremal graphs.

For $\delta \ge 1$ and $n\ge 1$, consider the simplicial complex of graphs on $n$ vertices in which each vertex has degree at most $\delta$; we identify a given graph with its edge set and admit one loop at each vertex. This complex is of some importance in the theory of semigroup algebras. When $\delta =1$, we obtain the matching complex, for which it is known that there is 3-torsion in degree $d$ of the homology whenever $\left( n-4 \right)/3\le d\le \left( n-6 \right)/2$. This paper establishes similar bounds for $\delta \ge 2$. Specifically, there is 3-torsion in degree $d$ whenever

$$\frac{\left( 3\delta -1 \right)n-8}{6}\le d\le \frac{\delta \left( n-1 \right)-4}{2}.$$

The procedure for detecting torsion is to construct an explicit cycle $z$ that is easily seen to have the property that $3z$ is a boundary. Defining a homomorphism that sends $z$ to a non-boundary element in the chain complex of a certain matching complex, we obtain that $z$ itself is a non-boundary. In particular, the homology class of $z$ has order 3.

In a random graph, counts for the number of vertices with given degrees will typically be dependent. We show via a multivariate normal and a Poisson process approximation that, for graphs which have independent edges, with a possibly inhomogeneous distribution, only when the degrees are large can we reasonably approximate the joint counts as independent. The proofs are based on Stein's method and the Stein-Chen method with a new size-biased coupling for such inhomogeneous random graphs, and, hence, bounds on the distributional distance are obtained. Finally, we illustrate that apparent (pseudo-)power-law-type behaviour can arise in such inhomogeneous networks despite not actually following a power-law degree distribution.

Let n points be placed independently in d-dimensional space according to the density f(x) = Ade−λ||x||α, λ, α > 0, x ∈ ℝd, d ≥ 2. Let dn be the longest edge length of the nearest-neighbor graph on these points. We show that (λ−1 log n)1−1/α dn - bn converges weakly to the Gumbel distribution, where bn ∼ ((d − 1)/λα) log log n. We also prove the following strong law for the normalized nearest-neighbor distance d̃n = (λ−1 log n)1−1/α dn/ log log n: (d − 1)/αλ ≤ lim infn→∞d̃n ≤ lim supn→∞d̃n ≤ d/αλ almost surely. Thus, the exponential rate of decay α = 1 is critical, in the sense that, for α > 1, dn → 0, whereas, for α ≤ 1, dn → ∞ almost surely as n → ∞.