Related papers: Hedetniemi's Conjecture Via Altermatic Number

A graph class is $\chi$-bounded if the only way to force large chromatic number in graphs from the class is by forming a large clique. In the 1970s, Erd\H{o}s conjectured that intersection graphs of straight-line segments in the plane are…

We give a short proof of the following theorem due to Jon H. Folkman (1969): The chromatic number of any graph is at most $2$ plus the maximum over all subgraphs of the difference between half the number of vertices and the independence…

Kneser's 1955 conjecture -- proven by Lov\'asz in 1978 -- asserts that in any partition of the $k$-subsets of $\{1, 2, \dots, n\}$ into $n-2k-3$ parts, one part contains two disjoint sets. Schrijver showed that one can restrict to…

By Lovasz' proof of the Kneser conjecture, the chromatic number of a graph G is bounded from below by the index of the Z_2-space Hom(K_2,G) plus two. We show that the cohomological index of Hom(K_2,G) is also greater than the cohomological…

The local chromatic number of a graph G is the number of colors appearing in the most colorful closed neighborhood of a vertex minimized over all proper colorings of G. We show that two specific topological obstructions that have the same…

We consider a natural graph operation $\Omega_k$ that is a certain inverse (formally: the right adjoint) to taking the k-th power of a graph. We show that it preserves the topology (the $\mathbb{Z}_2$-homotopy type) of the box complex, a…

A generalization of the four-color theorem, Hadwiger's conjecture is considered as one of the most important and challenging problems in graph theory, and odd Hadwiger's conjecture is a strengthening of Hadwiger's conjecture by way of…

We compute the exact value of the quantum chromatic numbers of Hadamard graphs of order $n=2^N$ for $N$ a multiple of $4$ using the upper bound derived by Avis, Hasegawa, Kikuchi, and Sasaki, as well as an application of the Hoffman-like…

For a graph $G$, the tree graph ${\cal T}_{G,t}$ has all tree subgraphs of $G$ with $t$ vertices as vertex set and two tree subgraphs are neighbors if they are edge-disjoint. Also, the $r^{th}$ cut number of $G$ is the minimum number of…

Tatsuyuki Hikita recently proved the Stanley--Stembridge conjecture using probabilistic methods, showing that the chromatic symmetric functions of unit interval graphs are $e$-positive. Finding a combinatorial interpretation for these…

A 2-hued coloring of a graph $G$ (also known as conditional $(k, 2)$-coloring and dynamic coloring) is a coloring such that for every vertex $v\in V(G)$ of degree at least $2$, the neighbors of $v$ receive at least $2$ colors. The smallest…

Two subgraphs $A,B$ of a graph $G$ are anticomplete if they are vertex-disjoint and there are no edges joining them. Is it true that if $G$ is a graph with bounded clique number, and sufficiently large chromatic number, then it has two…

We prove that there exist graphs which do not contain $K_t$ as an odd minor and whose chromatic number is at least $(\frac 32-o(1))t$. This disproves, in a strong form, the odd Hadwiger conjecture of Gerards and Seymour from 1993.

The chromatic polynomial $\pi_{G}(k)$ of a graph $G$ can be viewed as counting the number of vertices in a family of coloring graphs $\mathcal C_k(G)$ associated with (proper) $k$-colorings of $G$ as a function of the number of colors $k$.…

A vector $t$-coloring of a graph is an assignment of real vectors $p_1, \ldots, p_n$ to its vertices such that $p_i^Tp_i = t-1$ for all $i=1, \ldots, n$ and $p_i^Tp_j \le -1$ whenever $i$ and $j$ are adjacent. The vector chromatic number of…

We consider the following extension of the concept of adjacent strong edge colourings of graphs without isolated edges. Two distinct vertices which are at distant at most $r$ in a graph are called $r$-adjacent. The least number of colours…

Albertson conjectured that if graph $G$ has chromatic number $r$, then the crossing number of $G$ is at least that of the complete graph $K_r$. This conjecture in the case $r=5$ is equivalent to the four color theorem. It was verified for…

The strong chromatic number $\chi_{\text{s}}(G)$ of a graph $G$ on $n$ vertices is the least number $r$ with the following property: after adding $r \lceil n/r \rceil - n$ isolated vertices to $G$ and taking the union with any collection of…

We survey results on Hedetniemi's conjecture which are connected to adjoint functors in the "thin" category of graphs, and expose the obstacles to extending these results.

We introduce a conjecture about constructing critically (s+1)-chromatic graphs from critically s-chromatic graphs. We then show how this conjecture implies that any unmixed height two square-free monomial ideal I, i.e., the cover ideal of a…