A parity theorem about trees with specified degrees

Abstract Carsten Thomassen and I proved that in any graph G , the number of cycles containing a specified edge as well as all the vertices of odd degree is odd if and only if G is eulerian. Where all vertices have even degree this is a theorem of Shunichi Toida and where all vertices have odd degree it is Andrew Thomason’s extension of Smith’s Theorem. Our proof was not algorithmic. In this paper, I extend Thomason’s algorithm to one which, in a non-eulerian graph, finds a second cycle containing a specified edge and all the odd-degree vertices. Kenneth Berman extended Thomason’s Theorem to spanning trees: he proved that if T is a spanning tree such that the degree of every vertex in G − E ( T ) is odd, then there is an even number of spanning trees of G with the same degree as T at each vertex. In this paper, I give a common generalization of all of these theorems to a parity theorem about “good” trees in general graphs. My proof provides an algorithm for finding a second “good” tree.