11,535 research outputs found
Towards on-line Ohba's conjecture
The on-line choice number of a graph is a variation of the choice number
defined through a two person game. It is at least as large as the choice number
for all graphs and is strictly larger for some graphs. In particular, there are
graphs with whose on-line choice numbers are larger
than their chromatic numbers, in contrast to a recently confirmed conjecture of
Ohba that every graph with has its choice number
equal its chromatic number. Nevertheless, an on-line version of Ohba conjecture
was proposed in [P. Huang, T. Wong and X. Zhu, Application of polynomial method
to on-line colouring of graphs, European J. Combin., 2011]: Every graph
with has its on-line choice number equal its chromatic
number. This paper confirms the on-line version of Ohba conjecture for graphs
with independence number at most 3. We also study list colouring of
complete multipartite graphs with all parts of size 3. We prove
that the on-line choice number of is at most , and
present an alternate proof of Kierstead's result that its choice number is
. For general graphs , we prove that if then its on-line choice number equals chromatic number.Comment: new abstract and introductio
The chromatic polynomial of fatgraphs and its categorification
Motivated by Khovanov homology and relations between the Jones polynomial and
graph polynomials, we construct a homology theory for embedded graphs from
which the chromatic polynomial can be recovered as the Euler characteristic.
For plane graphs, we show that our chromatic homology can be recovered from the
Khovanov homology of an associated link. We apply this connection with Khovanov
homology to show that the torsion-free part of our chromatic homology is
independent of the choice of planar embedding of a graph.
We extend our construction and categorify the Bollobas-Riordan polynomial (a
generalisation of the Tutte polynomial to embedded graphs). We prove that both
our chromatic homology and the Khovanov homology of an associated link can be
recovered from this categorification.Comment: A substantial revision. To appear in Advances in Mathematic
Fractional total colourings of graphs of high girth
Reed conjectured that for every epsilon>0 and Delta there exists g such that
the fractional total chromatic number of a graph with maximum degree Delta and
girth at least g is at most Delta+1+epsilon. We prove the conjecture for
Delta=3 and for even Delta>=4 in the following stronger form: For each of these
values of Delta, there exists g such that the fractional total chromatic number
of any graph with maximum degree Delta and girth at least g is equal to
Delta+1
Approximate Graph Coloring by Semidefinite Programming
We consider the problem of coloring k-colorable graphs with the fewest
possible colors. We present a randomized polynomial time algorithm that colors
a 3-colorable graph on vertices with min O(Delta^{1/3} log^{1/2} Delta log
n), O(n^{1/4} log^{1/2} n) colors where Delta is the maximum degree of any
vertex. Besides giving the best known approximation ratio in terms of n, this
marks the first non-trivial approximation result as a function of the maximum
degree Delta. This result can be generalized to k-colorable graphs to obtain a
coloring using min O(Delta^{1-2/k} log^{1/2} Delta log n), O(n^{1-3/(k+1)}
log^{1/2} n) colors. Our results are inspired by the recent work of Goemans and
Williamson who used an algorithm for semidefinite optimization problems, which
generalize linear programs, to obtain improved approximations for the MAX CUT
and MAX 2-SAT problems. An intriguing outcome of our work is a duality
relationship established between the value of the optimum solution to our
semidefinite program and the Lovasz theta-function. We show lower bounds on the
gap between the optimum solution of our semidefinite program and the actual
chromatic number; by duality this also demonstrates interesting new facts about
the theta-function
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