Vertex arboricity of triangle-free graphs

Master's Project (M.S.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2016The vertex arboricity of a graph is the minimum number of colors needed to color the vertices so that the subgraph induced by each color class is a forest. In other words, the vertex arboricity of a graph is the fewest number of colors required in order to color a graph such that every cycle has at least two colors. Although not standard, we will refer to vertex arboricity simply as arboricity. In this paper, we discuss properties of chromatic number and k-defective chromatic number and how those properties relate to the arboricity of trianglefree graphs. In particular, we find bounds on the minimum order of a graph having arboricity three. Equivalently, we consider the largest possible vertex arboricity of triangle-free graphs of fixed order

Topological lower bounds for the chromatic number: A hierarchy

This paper is a study of ``topological'' lower bounds for the chromatic number of a graph. Such a lower bound was first introduced by Lov\'asz in 1978, in his famous proof of the \emph{Kneser conjecture} via Algebraic Topology. This conjecture stated that the \emph{Kneser graph} \KG_{m,n}, the graph with all $k$-element subsets of $\{1,2,...,n\}$ as vertices and all pairs of disjoint sets as edges, has chromatic number $n-2k+2$. Several other proofs have since been published (by B\'ar\'any, Schrijver, Dolnikov, Sarkaria, Kriz, Greene, and others), all of them based on some version of the Borsuk--Ulam theorem, but otherwise quite different. Each can be extended to yield some lower bound on the chromatic number of an arbitrary graph. (Indeed, we observe that \emph{every} finite graph may be represented as a generalized Kneser graph, to which the above bounds apply.) We show that these bounds are almost linearly ordered by strength, the strongest one being essentially Lov\'asz' original bound in terms of a neighborhood complex. We also present and compare various definitions of a \emph{box complex} of a graph (developing ideas of Alon, Frankl, and Lov\'asz and of \kriz). A suitable box complex is equivalent to Lov\'asz' complex, but the construction is simpler and functorial, mapping graphs with homomorphisms to $\Z_2$-spaces with $\Z_2$-maps.Comment: 16 pages, 1 figure. Jahresbericht der DMV, to appea

On the editing distance of graphs

An edge-operation on a graph $G$ is defined to be either the deletion of an existing edge or the addition of a nonexisting edge. Given a family of graphs $\mathcal{G}$, the editing distance from $G$ to $\mathcal{G}$ is the smallest number of edge-operations needed to modify $G$ into a graph from $\mathcal{G}$. In this paper, we fix a graph $H$ and consider ${\rm Forb}(n,H)$, the set of all graphs on $n$ vertices that have no induced copy of $H$. We provide bounds for the maximum over all $n$-vertex graphs $G$ of the editing distance from $G$ to ${\rm Forb}(n,H)$, using an invariant we call the {\it binary chromatic number} of the graph $H$. We give asymptotically tight bounds for that distance when $H$ is self-complementary and exact results for several small graphs $H$

On Packing Colorings of Distance Graphs

The {\em packing chromatic number} $\chi_{\rho}(G)$ of a graph $G$ is the least integer $k$ for which there exists a mapping $f$ from $V(G)$ to $\{1,2,\ldots ,k\}$ such that any two vertices of color $i$ are at distance at least $i+1$. This paper studies the packing chromatic number of infinite distance graphs $G(\mathbb{Z},D)$, i.e. graphs with the set $\mathbb{Z}$ of integers as vertex set, with two distinct vertices $i,j\in \mathbb{Z}$ being adjacent if and only if $|i-j|\in D$. We present lower and upper bounds for $\chi_{\rho}(G(\mathbb{Z},D))$, showing that for finite $D$, the packing chromatic number is finite. Our main result concerns distance graphs with $D=\{1,t\}$ for which we prove some upper bounds on their packing chromatic numbers, the smaller ones being for $t\geq 447$: $\chi_{\rho}(G(\mathbb{Z},\{1,t\}))\leq 40$ if $t$ is odd and $\chi_{\rho}(G(\mathbb{Z},\{1,t\}))\leq 81$ if $t$ is even