Caterpillars are Antimagic

Abstract

An antimagic labeling of a graph $G$ is an injection from $E(G)$ to $\{1,2,\dots,|E(G)|\}$ such that all vertex sums are pairwise distinct, where the vertex sum at vertex $u$ is the sum of the labels assigned to edges incident to $u$. A graph is called antimagic when it has an antimagic labeling. Hartsfield and Ringel conjectured that every simple connected graph other than $K_2$ is antimagic and the conjecture remains open even for trees. Here we prove that caterpillars are antimagic by means of an $O(n \log n)$ algorithm.