Number of spanning trees containing a given forest

Abstract

We consider all spanning trees of a complete simple graph $\Gamma$ on $n$ vertices that contain a given $m-$forest $F$. We show that the number of such spanning trees, $\tau(F)$, doesn't depend on the structure of $F$ and is completely determined by the number of vertices $q_i \, (i=1, ..., m)$ in each connected component of $F$. Specifically, $\tau(F) = q_1 q_2 \cdots q_m n^{m-2}$.