Counting the spanning trees of the 3-cube using edge slides

Abstract

We give a direct combinatorial proof of the known fact that the 3-cube has 384 spanning trees, using an "edge slide" operation on spanning trees. This gives an answer in the case n=3 to a question implicitly raised by Stanley. Our argument also gives a bijective proof of the n=3 case of a weighted count of the spanning trees of the n-cube due to Martin and Reiner.