Date of Award
Spring 2016
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science
First Advisor
Factor, Kim
Second Advisor
Engbers, John
Third Advisor
Brown, David
Abstract
Much work has been done in analyzing various classes of tournaments, giving a partial characterization of tournaments with adjacency matrices having equal and full real, nonnegative integer, Boolean, and term ranks. Relatively little is known about the corresponding adjacency matrix ranks of local out-tournaments, a larger family of digraphs containing the class of tournaments. Based on each of several structural theorems from Bang-Jensen, Huang, and Prisner, we will identify several classes of out-tournaments which have the desired adjacency matrix rank properties. First we will consider matrix ranks of out-tournament matrices from the perspective of the structural composition of the strong component layout of the adjacency matrix. Following that, we will consider adjacency matrix ranks of an out-tournament based on the cycles that the out-tournament contains. Most of the remaining chapters consider the adjacency matrix ranks of several classes of out-tournaments based on the form of their underlying graphs. In the case of the strong out-tournaments discussed in the final chapter, we examine the underlying graph of a representation that has the strong out-tournament as its catch digraph.