English

Planar Graphs with Ore-degree at Most seven is strongly $13$-edge-colorable

Combinatorics 2025-09-09 v1

Abstract

A strong edge-coloring of a graph GG is a coloring of edges of GG such that every color class forms an induced matching. The strong chromatic index is the minimum number of colors needed to color the graph. The Ore-degree θ(G)\theta(G) of a graph GG is the maximum sum of degrees of adjacent vertices. We show that every planar graph GG with θ(G)7\theta(G)\le 7 has strong chromatic index at most 1313. This settles a conjecture of Chen et al in the planar case. We use a discharging method, and apply Combinatorial Nullstellensatz to show reducible configurations. We provide an algorithm to allow Combinatorial Nullstellansatz extracting coefficients from large polynomials.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.06808,
  title  = {Planar Graphs with Ore-degree at Most seven is strongly $13$-edge-colorable},
  author = {Seth Nelson and Gexin Yu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.06808},
  year   = {2025}
}