Related papers: Spiral Chains: A New Proof of the Four Color Theor…

In 1978 Babai raised the question whether all minimal Cayley graphs have bounded chromatic number; in 1994 he conjectured a negative answer. In this paper we show that any minimal Cayley graph of a (finitely generated) generalized dihedral…

It was conjectured by the third author in about 1973 that every $d$-regular planar graph (possibly with parallel edges) can be $d$-edge-coloured, provided that for every odd set $X$ of vertices, there are at least $d$ edges between $X$ and…

No proof of the 4-color conjecture reveals why it is true; the goal has not been to go beyond proving the conjecture. The standard approach involves constructing an unavoidable finite set of reducible configurations to demonstrate that a…

Hadwiger Conjecture has been an open problem for over a half century1,6, which says that there is at most a complete graph Kt but no Kt+1 for every t-colorable graph. A few cases of Hadwiger Conjecture, such as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6-colorable…

The problem of finding the minimum number of colors to color a graph properly without containing any bicolored copy of a fixed family of subgraphs has been widely studied. Most well-known examples are star coloring and acyclic coloring of…

A (minimal) transversal of a partition is a set which contains exactly one element from each member of the partition and nothing else. A coloring of a graph is a partition of its vertex set into anticliques, that is, sets of pairwise…

This is the second paper in a series of two. The goal of the series is to give a polynomial time algorithm for the $4$-coloring problem and the $4$-precoloring extension problem restricted to the class of graphs with no induced six-vertex…

Let $P$ be a set of $n\geq 4$ points in general position in the plane. Consider all the closed straight line segments with both endpoints in $P$. Suppose that these segments are colored with the rule that disjoint segments receive different…

Given a graph $G=(V,E)$ and a proper vertex colouring of $G$, a Kempe chain is a subset of $V$ that induces a maximal connected subgraph of $G$ in which every vertex has one of two colours. To make a Kempe change is to obtain one colouring…

A graph is called $k$-critical if its chromatic number is $k$ but any proper subgraph has chromatic number less than $k$. An old and important problem in graph theory asks to determine the maximum number of edges in an $n$-vertex…

While planar graphs are flat from a topological viewpoint, we observe that they are not from a geometric one. We prove that every planar graph can be embedded into a surface consisting of spheres, glued together in a tree-like fashion. As a…

We make an attempt at proving the Four Colour Theorem in six pages.

Wang and Lih in 2002 conjectured that every planar graph without adjacent triangles is 4-choosable. In this paper, we prove that every planar graph without any 4-cycle adjacent to two triangles is DP-4-colorable, which improves the results…

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We give a new proof of the four-color theorem by exhibiting an unavoidable set of 2822 D-reducible configurations. The existence of such a set had been conjectured by several researchers including Stromquist, Appel and Haken, and Robertson,…

The better title is "Yet another FALSE proof of the 4-colour theorem." Please consider all versions of this paper as historical material on the way to a non-computer proof of the 4-colour theorem. Interpreted as proofs, all versions are…

In this paper, we show that every $(2P_2,K_4)$-free graph is 4-colorable. The bound is attained by the five-wheel and the complement of the seven-cycle. This answers an open question by Wagon \cite{Wa80} in the 1980s. Our result can also be…

Thomassen showed that planar graphs are 5-list-colourable, and that planar graphs of girth at least five are 3-list-colourable. An easy degeneracy argument shows that planar graphs of girth at least four are 4-list-colourable. In 2022,…

The {\em acyclic chromatic number} of a graph is the least number of colors needed to properly color its vertices so that none of its cycles has only two colors. The {\em acyclic chromatic index} is the analogous graph parameter for edge…

We prove that if G is a 4-critical graph of girth at least five then |E(G)|>=(5|V(G)|+2)/3. As a corollary, graphs of girth at least five embeddable in the Klein bottle or torus are 3-colorable. These are results of Thomas and Walls, and…