Perfect Elimination and Chordal Bipartite Graphs

We define two types of bipartite graphs, chordal bipartite graphs and perfect elimination bipartite graphs, and prove theorems analogous to those of Dirac and Rose for chordal graphs (rigid circuit graphs, triangulated graphs). Our results are applicable to Gaussian elimination on sparse matrices where a sequence of pivots preserving zeros is sought. Our work removes the constraint imposed by Haskins and Rose that pivots must be along the main diagonal.