A distance-heredity graph, also known as a completely separable graph, is a graph such that the distance matrix of every connected vertex-induced subgraph of is the submatrix obtained from the distance matrix of itself corresponding to the subset of vertices . The name "distance-hereditary" derives from the fact that in such graphs, the induced subgraphs "inherit" the distance relationship from their parent graph.
A graph is distance-hereditary iff for any four vertices , , , , at least two of the sums
(1)
(2)
(3)
are equal, where denotes the graph distance from vertex to .
The numbers of connected distance-hereditary graphs on , 2, ... vertices are 1, 1, 2, 6, 18, 73, 308, 1484, 7492, 40010, 220676, ... (OEIS A277862).
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