207 research outputs found
On topological relaxations of chromatic conjectures
There are several famous unsolved conjectures about the chromatic number that
were relaxed and already proven to hold for the fractional chromatic number. We
discuss similar relaxations for the topological lower bound(s) of the chromatic
number. In particular, we prove that such a relaxed version is true for the
Behzad-Vizing conjecture and also discuss the conjectures of Hedetniemi and of
Hadwiger from this point of view. For the latter, a similar statement was
already proven in an earlier paper of the first author with G. Tardos, our main
concern here is that the so-called odd Hadwiger conjecture looks much more
difficult in this respect. We prove that the statement of the odd Hadwiger
conjecture holds for large enough Kneser graphs and Schrijver graphs of any
fixed chromatic number
Colouring quadrangulations of projective spaces
A graph embedded in a surface with all faces of size 4 is known as a
quadrangulation. We extend the definition of quadrangulation to higher
dimensions, and prove that any graph G which embeds as a quadrangulation in the
real projective space P^n has chromatic number n+2 or higher, unless G is
bipartite. For n=2 this was proved by Youngs [J. Graph Theory 21 (1996),
219-227]. The family of quadrangulations of projective spaces includes all
complete graphs, all Mycielski graphs, and certain graphs homomorphic to
Schrijver graphs. As a corollary, we obtain a new proof of the Lovasz-Kneser
theorem
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