English

4-critical graphs on surfaces without contractible (<=4)-cycles

Combinatorics 2016-12-16 v2 Discrete Mathematics

Abstract

We show that if G is a 4-critical graph embedded in a fixed surface Σ\Sigma so that every contractible cycle has length at least 5, then G can be expressed as G=GG1G2...GkG=G'\cup G_1\cup G_2\cup ... \cup G_k, where V(G)|V(G')| and kk are bounded by a constant (depending linearly on the genus of Σ\Sigma) and G1,GkG_1\ldots,G_k are graphs (of unbounded size) whose structure we describe exactly. The proof is computer-assisted - we use computer to enumerate all plane 4-critical graphs of girth 5 with a precolored cycle of length at most 16, that are used in the basic case of the inductive proof of the statement.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1305.2670,
  title  = {4-critical graphs on surfaces without contractible (<=4)-cycles},
  author = {Zdeněk Dvořák and Bernard Lidický},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1305.2670},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

52 pages, 19 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T00:15:15.708Z