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Wednesday, 22 January 2025

A Special Complete Bipartite Graph

In December of 2024, I made a post titled Welcoming In 2025 in which I looked at some of the more interesting properties of the number 2025. Recently, in this YouTube video, I came across another interesting property of the number in connection to complete bipartite graphs and spanning trees.

The definition of a complete bipartite graph is a graph where all possible edges connect vertices in two disjoint sets, but no edge connects vertices in the same set. An example is K3,5 shown in Figure 1. The two disjoint sets have 3 and 5 vertices, hence the nomenclature.


A spanning tree is defined as a graph that connects all of a graph's vertices without creating any loops or cycles. It's a subgraph of the original graph, meaning it uses all of the vertices but only some of the edges.

An example of a spanning tree for K3,5 is shown in Figure 2 where the red edges represent the spanning tree.

There is a general formula for calculating the number of spanning trees for a Km.n bipartite graph and it is:s(K3,5)=mn1nm1So in the case of K3,5 we have:s(K3,5)=3452=2025Thus there are 2025 spanning trees for a complete K3,5 bipartite graph and thus we have another interesting property of this year's number.

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