Hierarchical Organization. We prove the following statement: At
any step of construction of the MST and graph G of genus g
k, if two elements are connected via at least one path in one of
the considered graphs, then they also are connected in the other
one. To this end, we must recall the concept of bridge: a link
between two elements is a bridge whenever the elements are
disconnected via any path in its absence. It follows from the
definition of MST that all links in the MST are bridges. Conversely,
for graphs with a fixed genus, we have the following
important property: If a bridge is inserted between two previously
unconnected regions of a graph G, characterized by the
genus g k, then the genus of the graph obtained after the
insertion is still k. This property is straightforwardly proved as a
corollary of the Miller theorem (25, 26) by noting that the
addition of a bridge to a graph leaves unchanged the biconnected
components of the graph. The above property implies that if the
construction algorithm of G selects a link that is a bridge for the
graph at that step of construction, then the link is always added
to the graph. We now prove the above statement by induction.
In the following, we indicate as MSTm and Gm the graphs
constructed by using the similarity measure up to the mth row of
Sord. For the first two steps of construction, the statement is true:
MST2 and G2 graphs are always equal. Now suppose the
statement is true at the step m of construction, i.e., for Gm and
MSTm. For the step m 1, only four cases are possible: