On the path partition of graphs

Abstract

Let $G$ be a graph of order $n$. The maximum and minimum degree of $G$ are denoted by $\Delta$ and $\delta$ respectively. The \emph{path partition number} $\mu (G)$ of a graph $G$ is the minimum number of paths needed to partition the vertices of $G$. Magnant, Wang and Yuan conjectured that $\mu (G)\leq \max \left \{ \frac{n}{\delta +1}, \frac{\left( \Delta -\delta \right) n}{\left( \Delta +\delta \right) }\right \} .$ In this work, we give a positive answer to this conjecture, for $ \Delta \geq 2 \delta $.\medskip \end{abstract}