English

On Fair and Tolerant Colorings of Graphs

Combinatorics 2025-11-25 v2

Abstract

A (not necessarily proper) vertex coloring of a graph GG with color classes V1V_1, V2V_2, \dots, VkV_k, is said to be a {\it Fair And Tolerant vertex coloring of GG with kk colors}, whenever V1V_1, V2V_2, \dots, VkV_k are nonempty and there exist two real numbers α\alpha and β\beta such that α[0,1]\alpha \in [0,1] and β[0,1]\beta \in [0,1] and the following condition holds for each arbitrary vertex vv and every arbitrary color class ViV_i: ViN(v)={αdeg(v)\mboxif  vViβdeg(v)\mboxif  vVi. \bigl| V_i \cap N (v) \bigr| = \begin{cases} \alpha \deg (v) & \mbox{ if } \ \ v \notin V_i \beta \deg (v) & \mbox{ if } \ \ v \in V_i . \end{cases} The {\it FAT chromatic number} of GG, denoted by χFAT(G)\chi ^{{\rm FAT}} (G), is defined as the maximum positive integer kk for which GG admits a Fair And Tolerant vertex coloring with kk colors. The concept of the FAT chromatic number of graphs was introduced and studied by Beers and Mulas, where they asked for the existence of a function f ⁣:NRf \colon \mathbb{N} \to \mathbb{R} in such a way that the inequality χFAT(G)  f(χ(G))\chi ^{{\rm FAT}} (G) \ \leq \ f \big( \chi (G) \big) holds for all graphs GG. Another similar interesting question concerns the existence of some function g ⁣:NRg \colon \mathbb{N} \to \mathbb{R} such that the inequality χ(G)  g(χFAT(G))\chi (G) \ \leq \ g \left( \chi ^{{\rm FAT}} (G) \right) holds for every graph GG. In this paper, we establish that both questions admit negative resolutions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2511.14871,
  title  = {On Fair and Tolerant Colorings of Graphs},
  author = {Saeed Shaebani},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.14871},
  year   = {2025}
}