English

Bijective proofs of proper coloring theorems

Combinatorics 2020-07-28 v1

Abstract

The chromatic polynomial and its generalization, the chromatic symmetric function, are two important graph invariants. Celebrated theorems of Birkhoff, Whitney, and Stanley show how both objects can be expressed in three different ways: as sums over all spanning subgraphs, as sums over spanning subgraphs with no broken circuits, and in terms of acyclic orientations with compatible colorings. We establish all six of these expressions bijectively. In fact, we do this with only two bijections, as the proofs in the symmetric function setting are obtained using the same bijections as in the polynomial case and the bijection for broken circuits is just a restriction of the one for all spanning subgraphs.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2007.13725,
  title  = {Bijective proofs of proper coloring theorems},
  author = {Bruce E. Sagan and Vincent Vatter},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.13725},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

18 pages, 5 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T17:26:26.932Z