English

The odd Hadwiger's conjecture is "almost'' decidable

Combinatorics 2015-08-18 v1 Discrete Mathematics

Abstract

The odd Hadwiger's conjecture, made by Gerads and Seymour in early 1990s, is an analogue of the famous Hadwiger's conjecture. It says that every graph with no odd KtK_t-minor is (t1)(t-1)-colorable. This conjecture is known to be true for t5t \leq 5, but the cases t5t \geq 5 are wide open. So far, the most general result says that every graph with no odd KtK_t-minor is O(tlogt)O(t \sqrt{\log t})-colorable. In this paper, we tackle this conjecture from an algorithmic view, and show the following: For a given graph GG and any fixed tt, there is a polynomial time algorithm to output one of the following: \begin{enumerate} \item a (t1)(t-1)-coloring of GG, or \item an odd KtK_{t}-minor of GG, or \item after making all "reductions" to GG, the resulting graph HH (which is an odd minor of GG and which has no reductions) has a tree-decomposition (T,Y)(T, Y) such that torso of each bag YtY_t is either \begin{itemize} \item of size at most f1(t)lognf_1(t) \log n for some function f1f_1 of tt, or \item a graph that has a vertex XX of order at most f2(t)f_2(t) for some function f2f_2 of tt such that YtXY_t-X is bipartite. Moreover, degree of tt in TT is at most f3(t)f_3(t) for some function f3f_3 of tt. \end{itemize} \end{enumerate} Let us observe that the last odd minor HH is indeed a minimal counterexample to the odd Hadwiger's conjecture for the case tt. So our result says that a minimal counterexample satisfies the lsat conclusion.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1508.04053,
  title  = {The odd Hadwiger's conjecture is "almost'' decidable},
  author = {Ken-ichi Kawarabayashi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1508.04053},
  year   = {2015}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T10:35:19.338Z