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I need a source about the history of algebraic graph theory. I mean for solving which problems or responding to what needs it was created?

Indeed, I want to write a note about the history of the birth of it. Can anybody help me?

Bests.

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A few comments about the history of algebraic graph theory:

(1) Some early work was due to William Tutte related to the four-color conjecture. The Tutte polynomial (and thus the chromatic polynomial) come out of his work.

(2) A very brief comment about the history appears in the first chapter of Fan Chung's Spectral Graph Theory. Early research by people like Allen Schwenk & Norman Biggs displayed the power of the linear algebra of graph adjacency matrices.

(3) I ran into Dale Mesner at a conference long ago -- he was very friendly and supportive of young researchers. The Bose-Mesner algebra dates from the 1950s. It was very effective in ruling out certain configurations (including distance regular & strongly regular graphs) and could also be used to narrow down a search for such objects.

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