Defective and Clustered Graph Colouring

Consider the following two ways to colour the vertices of a graph where the requirement that adjacent vertices get distinct colours is relaxed. A colouring has "defect" $d$ if each monochromatic component has maximum degree at most $d$. A colouring has "clustering" $c$ if each monochromatic component has at most $c$ vertices. This paper surveys research on these types of colourings, where the first priority is to minimise the number of colours, with small defect or small clustering as a secondary goal. List colouring variants are also considered. The following graph classes are studied: outerplanar graphs, planar graphs, graphs embeddable in surfaces, graphs with given maximum degree, graphs with given maximum average degree, graphs excluding a given subgraph, graphs with linear crossing number, linklessly or knotlessly embeddable graphs, graphs with given Colin de Verdi\`ere parameter, graphs with given circumference, graphs excluding a fixed graph as an immersion, graphs with given thickness, graphs with given stack- or queue-number, graphs excluding $K_t$ as a minor, graphs excluding $K_{s,t}$ as a minor, and graphs excluding an arbitrary graph $H$ as a minor. Several open problems are discussed.Comment: This is a preliminary version of a dynamic survey to be published in the Electronic Journal of Combinatoric

Generalized Colorings of Graphs

A graph coloring is an assignment of labels called “colors” to certain elements of a graph subject to certain constraints. The proper vertex coloring is the most common type of graph coloring, where each vertex of a graph is assigned one color such that no two adjacent vertices share the same color, with the objective of minimizing the number of colors used. One can obtain various generalizations of the proper vertex coloring problem, by strengthening or relaxing the constraints or changing the objective. We study several types of such generalizations in this thesis. Series-parallel graphs are multigraphs that have no K4-minor. We provide bounds on their fractional and circular chromatic numbers and the defective version of these pa-rameters. In particular we show that the fractional chromatic number of any series-parallel graph of odd girth k is exactly 2k/(k − 1), confirming a conjecture by Wang and Yu. We introduce a generalization of defective coloring: each vertex of a graph is assigned a fraction of each color, with the total amount of colors at each vertex summing to 1. We define the fractional defect of a vertex v to be the sum of the overlaps with each neighbor of v, and the fractional defect of the graph to be the maximum of the defects over all vertices. We provide results on the minimum fractional defect of 2-colorings of some graphs. We also propose some open questions and conjectures. Given a (not necessarily proper) vertex coloring of a graph, a subgraph is called rainbow if all its vertices receive different colors, and monochromatic if all its vertices receive the same color. We consider several types of coloring here: a no-rainbow-F coloring of G is a coloring of the vertices of G without rainbow subgraph isomorphic to F ; an F -WORM coloring of G is a coloring of the vertices of G without rainbow or monochromatic subgraph isomorphic to F ; an (M, R)-WORM coloring of G is a coloring of the vertices of G with neither a monochromatic subgraph isomorphic to M nor a rainbow subgraph isomorphic to R. We present some results on these concepts especially with regards to the existence of colorings, complexity, and optimization within certain graph classes. Our focus is on the case that F , M or R is a path, cycle, star, or clique

Graph Theory

Graph theory is a rapidly developing area of mathematics. Recent years have seen the development of deep theories, and the increasing importance of methods from other parts of mathematics. The workshop on Graph Theory brought together together a broad range of researchers to discuss some of the major new developments. There were three central themes, each of which has seen striking recent progress: the structure of graphs with forbidden subgraphs; graph minor theory; and applications of the entropy compression method. The workshop featured major talks on current work in these areas, as well as presentations of recent breakthroughs and connections to other areas. There was a particularly exciting selection of longer talks, including presentations on the structure of graphs with forbidden induced subgraphs, embedding simply connected 2-complexes in 3-space, and an announcement of the solution of the well-known Oberwolfach Problem

Combinatorics

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Circular choosability

International audienceWe study circular choosability, a notion recently introduced by Mohar and by Zhu. First, we provide a negative answer to a question of Zhu about circular cliques. We next prove that cch(G) = O(ch(G) + ln |V(G)|) for every graph G. We investigate a generalisation of circular choosability, the circular f-choosability, where f is a function of the degrees. We also consider the circular choice number of planar graphs. Mohar asked for the value of τ := sup {cch(G) : G is planar}, and we prove that 68, thereby providing a negative answer to another question of Mohar. We also study the circular choice number of planar and outerplanar graphs with prescribed girth, and graphs with bounded density

On hereditary graph classes defined by forbidding Truemper configurations: recognition and combinatorial optimization algorithms, and χ-boundedness results

Truemper configurations are four types of graphs that helped us understand the structure of several well-known hereditary graph classes. The most famous examples are perhaps the class of perfect graphs and the class of even-hole-free graphs: for both of them, some Truemper configurations are excluded (as induced subgraphs), and this fact appeared to be useful, and played some role in the proof of the known decomposition theorems for these classes. The main goal of this thesis is to contribute to the systematic exploration of hereditary graph classes defined by forbidding Truemper configurations. We study many of these classes, and we investigate their structure by applying the decomposition method. We then use our structural results to analyze the complexity of the maximum clique, maximum stable set and optimal coloring problems restricted to these classes. Finally, we provide polynomial-time recognition algorithms for all of these classes, and we obtain χ-boundedness results

New Computational Upper Bounds for Ramsey Numbers R(3,k)

Using computational techniques we derive six new upper bounds on the classical two-color Ramsey numbers: R(3,10) <= 42, R(3,11) <= 50, R(3,13) <= 68, R(3,14) <= 77, R(3,15) <= 87, and R(3,16) <= 98. All of them are improvements by one over the previously best known bounds. Let e(3,k,n) denote the minimum number of edges in any triangle-free graph on n vertices without independent sets of order k. The new upper bounds on R(3,k) are obtained by completing the computation of the exact values of e(3,k,n) for all n with k <= 9 and for all n <= 33 for k = 10, and by establishing new lower bounds on e(3,k,n) for most of the open cases for 10 <= k <= 15. The enumeration of all graphs witnessing the values of e(3,k,n) is completed for all cases with k <= 9. We prove that the known critical graph for R(3,9) on 35 vertices is unique up to isomorphism. For the case of R(3,10), first we establish that R(3,10) = 43 if and only if e(3,10,42) = 189, or equivalently, that if R(3,10) = 43 then every critical graph is regular of degree 9. Then, using computations, we disprove the existence of the latter, and thus show that R(3,10) <= 42.Comment: 28 pages (includes a lot of tables); added improved lower bound for R(3,11); added some note