Kirchhoff's theorem
Teorema de Kirchhoff
- Date
- 1847 · confidence high
- Place
- Königsberg (Kaliningrad), Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia
- Credited to
- Gustav Kirchhoff
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
What was discovered
Graph theory theorem, published by Gustav Kirchhoff in 1847 from his work on electrical circuits, allowing the number of spanning trees of a graph to be computed as a cofactor of its Laplacian matrix.
What it led to
- Generalisation of Cayley's formula for complete graphs
- Polynomial-time computation of the number of spanning trees
- Standard tool in circuit and graph theory