Making connections [graph theory]
Isabel M. Beichl, Frank Sullivan · IEEE Computational Science and Engineering · 1996
One of the problems that occurs repeatedly in scientific computing is deciding whether an object is connected or disconnected. It happens that this question is related to finding a spanning tree for a graph. In other words, if you have a set of points with connections between some pairs of them, you would like the least number of connections that still keeps the set connected. You can find this minimum spanning tree with a method called depth first search, among other ways. The paper addresses the question of determining connected components.