R
Rishtaara
Discrete Mathematics
Lesson 6 of 11Article16 min

Trees, Spanning Trees & Shortest Paths

Trees, Spanning Trees & Shortest Paths

Acyclic connected structure

  • Rooted trees: parent/child; binary trees; traversal orders.
  • MST: Kruskal / Prim — connect all vertices at minimum total weight.
  • Shortest paths: BFS unweighted; Dijkstra non-negative weights.
  • Union-Find powers Kruskal's efficiency.
Many "optimisation on networks" problems reduce to spanning trees or shortest paths — recognise the pattern.