English

Planar 4-critical graphs with four triangles

Combinatorics 2016-12-16 v1 Discrete Mathematics

Abstract

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 graphs. This answers a question of Erdos from 1990.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1306.1477,
  title  = {Planar 4-critical graphs with four triangles},
  author = {Oleg V. Borodin and Zdeněk Dvořák and Alexandr V. Kostochka and Bernard Lidický and Matthew Yancey},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1306.1477},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

20 pages, 7 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T00:29:19.712Z