Related papers: Strictly critical snarks with girth or cyclic conn…

Gallai asked in 1984 if any $k$-critical graph on $n$ vertices contains at least $n$ distinct $(k-1)$-critical subgraphs. The answer is trivial for $k\leq 3$. Improving a result of Stiebitz, Abbott and Zhou proved in 1995 that for all…

A vertex or edge in a graph is critical if its deletion reduces the chromatic number of the graph by 1. We consider the problems of deciding whether a graph has a critical vertex or edge, respectively. We give a complexity dichotomy for…

A graph with $v$ vertices is $(r)$-pancyclic if it contains precisely $r$ cycles of every length from 3 to $v$. A bipartite graph with even number of vertices $v$ is said to be $(r)$-bipancyclic if it contains precisely $r$ cycles of each…

In 1976, Loupekine introduced (via Isaacs) a very general way of constructing new snarks from old snarks by cyclically connecting multipoles constructed from smaller snarks. In this paper, we generalize Loupekine's construction to produce a…

A strong edge coloring of a graph is a proper edge coloring in which every color class is an induced matching. The strong chromatic index $\chi_s'(G)$ of a graph $G$ is the minimum number of colors in a strong edge coloring of $G$. Let…

For fixed $k\ge 2$, determining the order of magnitude of the number of edges in an $n$-vertex bipartite graph not containing $C_{2k}$, the cycle of length $2k$, is a long-standing open problem. We consider an extension of this problem to…

A graph $G=(V,E)$ is a $k$-critical graph if $G$ is not $(k -1)$-colorable but $G-e$ is $(k-1)$-colorable for every $e\in E(G)$. In this paper, we construct a family of 4-critical planar graphs with $n$ vertices and $\frac{7n-13}{3}$ edges.…

It is well-known that the circular flow number of a bridgeless cubic graph can be computed in terms of certain partitions of its vertex-set with prescribed properties. In the present paper, we first study some of these properties that turn…

We show that every sufficiently large plane triangulation has a large collection of nested cycles that either are pairwise disjoint, or pairwise intersect in exactly one vertex, or pairwise intersect in exactly two vertices. We apply this…

We prove a version of symmetric criticality for ropelength-critical knots. Our theorem implies that a knot or link with a symmetric representative has a ropelength-critical configuration with the same symmetry. We use this to construct new…

A near-factor of a finite simple graph $G$ is a matching that saturates all vertices except one. A graph $G$ is said to be near-factor-critical if the deletion of any vertex from $G$ results in a subgraph that has a near-factor. We prove…

By the Grunbaum-Aksenov Theorem (extending Grotzsch's Theorem) every planar graph with at most three triangles is 3-colorable. However, there are infinitely many planar 4-critical graphs with exactly four triangles. We describe all such…

In this paper we show that many snarks have shortest cycle covers of length $\frac{4}{3}m+c$ for a constant $c$, where $m$ is the number of edges in the graph, in agreement with the conjecture that all snarks have shortest cycle covers of…

For a graph (undirected, directed, or mixed), a cycle-factor is a collection of vertex-disjoint cycles covering the entire vertex set. Cycle-factors subject to parity constraints arise naturally in the study of structural graph theory and…

A vertex coloring of a graph is said to be pseudocomplete if, for any two distinct colors, there exists at least one edge with those two colors as its end vertices. The pseudoachromatic number of a graph is the greatest number of colors…

We say that a digraph is essentially cyclic if its Laplacian spectrum is not completely real. The essential cyclicity implies the presence of directed cycles, but not vice versa. The problem of characterizing essential cyclicity in terms of…

A $c$-crossing-critical graph is one that has crossing number at least $c$ but each of its proper subgraphs has crossing number less than $c$. Recently, a set of explicit construction rules was identified by Bokal, Oporowski, Richter, and…

Testing if a given graph $G$ contains the $k$-vertex path $P_k$ as a minor or as an induced minor is trivial for every fixed integer $k\geq 1$. However, the situation changes for the problem of checking if a graph can be modified into $P_k$…

A long-standing conjecture of Berge suggests that every bridgeless cubic graph can be expressed as a union of at most five perfect matchings. This conjecture trivially holds for $3$-edge-colourable cubic graphs, but remains widely open for…

We show that the size of a 4-critical graph of girth at least five is bounded by a linear function of its genus. This strengthens the previous bound on the size of such graphs given by Thomassen. It also serves as the basic case for the…