Cut property

Let be an undirected graph with an edge weight . Suppose is part of an MST . Let be a cut where no edge of is in the cut edges . Then for of minimum weight - is part of an MST .

Proof

If then and we are done.

Assume .

Let . As is an MST it contains a path from to . As and the path contains an edge .

Let .

We have the size of is as is a tree.

Consider the cycle - rewrite this cycle as . We will use this to show is connected.

Let . As is connected there must a path in connecting to .

If uses replace by to form which only uses edges in . As connects to we have is connected.

As is connected on and has edges it has to be a spanning tree of .

Note as is the minimum weight edge in we have and moreover This gives that is of minimum weight as was a MST.

All together this gives us that is an MST where , proving the statement.