Related papers: Planar Graphs have Independence Ratio at least 3/1…
How large must the chromatic number of a graph be, in terms of the graph's maximum degree, to ensure that the most efficient way to reduce the chromatic number by removing vertices is to remove an independent set? By a reduction to a…
Grotzsch proved that every triangle-free planar graph is 3-colorable. Thomassen proved that every planar graph of girth at least five is 3-choosable. As for other surfaces, Thomassen proved that there are only finitely many 4-critical…
For the four-color theorem that has been developed over one and half centuries, all people believe it right but without complete proof convincing all1-3. Former proofs are to find the basic four-colorable patterns on a planar graph to…
Settling Kahn's conjecture (2001), we prove the following upper bound on the number $i(G)$ of independent sets in a graph $G$ without isolated vertices: \[ i(G) \le \prod_{uv \in E(G)} i(K_{d_u,d_v})^{1/(d_u d_v)}, \] where $d_u$ is the…
Strengthening Hadwiger's conjecture, Gerards and Seymour conjectured in 1995 that every graph with no odd $K_t$-minor is properly $(t-1)$-colorable, this is known as the Odd Hadwiger's conjecture. We prove a relaxation of the above…
A graph is $(d_1, \ldots, d_k)$-colorable if its vertex set can be partitioned into $k$ nonempty subsets so that the subgraph induced by the $i$th part has maximum degree at most $d_i$ for each $i\in\{1, \ldots, k\}$. It is known that for…
A star $k$-coloring is a proper $k$-coloring where the union of two color classes induces a star forest. While every planar graph is 4-colorable, not every planar graph is star 4-colorable. One method to produce a star 4-coloring is to…
A matchstick graph is a planar unit-distance graph. We call it \emph{4-regular} if every vertex has degree 4. While examples of 4-regular matchstick graphs with fewer than 63 vertices are known only for $n \in \{52, 54, 57, 60\}$, we prove…
Consider a graph on the non-singular matrices over a finite field, in which two distinct non-singular matrices are joined by an edge whenever their sum is singular. We prove an upper bound for the independence number of this graph. As a…
In the first partial result toward Steinberg's now-disproved three coloring conjecture, Abbott and Zhou used a counting argument to show that every planar graph without cycles of lengths 4 through 11 is 3-colorable. Implicit in their proof…
We characterize the connected graphs of given order $n$ and given independence number $\alpha$ that maximize the number of maximum independent sets. For $3\leq \alpha\leq n/2$, there is a unique such graph that arises from the disjoint…
Let $\mathcal{F}$ be a nonempty family of graphs. A graph $G$ is called $\mathcal{F}$-\textit{free} if it contains no graph from $\mathcal{F}$ as a subgraph. For a positive integer $n$, the \emph{planar Tur\'an number} of $\F$, denoted by…
A vertex coloring of a graph is said to be \textit{conflict-free} with respect to neighborhoods if for every non-isolated vertex there is a color appearing exactly once in its (open) neighborhood. As defined in [Fabrici et al.,…
We show that the cop number of any graph on 18 or fewer vertices is at most 3. This answers a question posed by Andreae in 1986, as well as more recently by Baird et al. We also find all 3-cop-win graphs on 11 vertices, narrow down the…
Let $G$ be a triangle-free graph with $n$ vertices and average degree $t$. We show that $G$ contains at least \[ e^{(1-n^{-1/12})\frac{1}{2}\frac{n}{t}\ln t (\frac{1}{2}\ln t-1)} \] independent sets. This improves a recent result of the…
Thomassen conjectured that triangle-free planar graphs have exponentially many 3-colorings. Recently, he disproved his conjecture by providing examples of such graphs with $n$ vertices and at most $2^{15n/\log_2 n}$ 3-colorings. We improve…
We study kernelization (a kind of efficient preprocessing) for NP-hard problems on planar graphs. Our main result is a kernel of size at most 9k vertices for the Planar Maximum Nonseparating Independent Set problem. A direct consequence of…
An odd independent set $S$ in a graph $G=(V,E)$ is an independent set of vertices such that, for every vertex $v \in V \setminus S$, either $N(v) \cap S = \emptyset$ or $|N(v) \cap S| \equiv 1$ (mod 2), where $N(v)$ stands for the open…
The inclusion relation between simple objects in the plane may be used to define geometric set systems, or hypergraphs. Properties of various types of colorings of these hypergraphs have been the subject of recent investigations, with…
The Petersen colouring conjecture states that every bridgeless cubic graph admits an edge-colouring with $5$ colours such that for every edge $e$, the set of colours assigned to the edges adjacent to $e$ has cardinality either $2$ or $4$,…