Spanning trees whose reducible stems have a few branch vertices
Let be a tree. Then a vertex of with degree one is a leaf of and a vertex of degree at least three is a branch vertex of . The set of leaves of is denoted by and the set of branch vertices of is denoted by . For two distinct vertices , of , let denote the unique path in connecting and Let be a tree with . For each leaf of , let denote the nearest branch vertex to . We delete from for all . The resulting subtree of is called the reducible stem of and denoted...