... light of the information available for the total number of matchings of trees, unicyclic graphs, bicyclic graphs, it is natural to consider other classes of g raphs, and the connected graphs with ... π-electron energies with the framewo rk of the HMOapproximation [18, 19], the theory of graphic spectra and nullity of graphs; see [3, 9, 10,11, 1 7]), whereas to our best knowledge, the to tal number ... number of matchings of tricyclic graphs wa s, so far, not considered. In this paper, we characterize the extremal graphs amongn-vertex tricyclic graphs with the smallest value of total number of...