English

Colouring the 1-skeleton of $d$-dimensional triangulations

Combinatorics 2024-11-15 v2 Algebraic Topology

Abstract

While every plane triangulation is colourable with three or four colours, Heawood showed that a plane triangulation is 3-colourable if and only if every vertex has even degree. In d3d \geq 3 dimensions, however, every kd+1k \geq d+1 may occur as the chromatic number of some triangulation of Sd{\mathbb S}^d. As a first step, Joswig structurally characterised which triangulations of Sd{\mathbb S}^d have a (d+1)(d+1)-colourable 1-skeleton. In the 20 years since Joswig's result, no characterisations have been found for any k>d+1k>d+1. In this paper, we structurally characterise which triangulations of Sd{\mathbb S}^d have a (d+2)(d+2)-colourable 1-skeleton: they are precisely the triangulations that have a subdivision such that for every (d2)(d-2)-cell, the number of incident (d1)(d-1)-cells is divisible by three.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2409.11762,
  title  = {Colouring the 1-skeleton of $d$-dimensional triangulations},
  author = {Tim Planken},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.11762},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

19 pages, 2 figures