We investigate the spectral properties of matrices associated with comb graphs. We show that the adjacency matrices and adjacency matrix Laplacians of the sequences of graphs show a spectral similarity relationship in the sense of work by L. Malozemov and A. Teplyaev (Self-similarity, operators and dynamics, Math. Phys. Anal. Geometry6 (2003), 201–218), and hence these sequences of graphs show a spectral decimation property similar to that of the Laplacians of the Sierpiński gasket graph and other fractal graphs.

In 1990, Howie and McFadden showed that every proper two-sided ideal of the full transformation monoid $T_n$, the set of all maps from an $n$-set to itself under composition, has a generating set, consisting of idempotents, that is no larger than any other generating set. This fact is a direct consequence of the same property holding in an associated finite $0$-simple semigroup. We show a correspondence between finite $0$-simple semigroups that have this property and bipartite graphs that satisfy a condition that is similar to, but slightly stronger than, Hall's condition. The results are applied in order to recover the above result for the full transformation monoid and to prove the analogous result for the proper two-sided ideals of the monoid of endomorphisms of a finite vector space.

A graph H decomposes into a graph G if one can write H as an edge-disjoint union of graphs isomorphic to G. H decomposes into D, where D is a family of graphs, when H can be written as a union of graphs each isomorphic to some member of D, and every member of D is represented at least once. In this paper it is shown that the d-dimensional cube Qd decomposes into any graph G of size d each of whose blocks is either an even cycle or an edge. Furthennore, Qd decomposes into D, where D is any set of six trees of size d.