The Strong Perfect Graph Conjecture: 40 years of Attempts, and its Resolution

International audienceThe Strong Perfect Graph Conjecture (SPGC) was certainly one of the most challenging conjectures in graph theory. During more than four decades, numerous attempts were made to solve it, by combinatorial methods, by linear algebraic methods, or by polyhedral methods. The first of these three approaches yielded the first (and to date only) proof of the SPGC; the other two remain promising to consider in attempting an alternative proof. This paper is an unbalanced survey of the attempts to solve the SPGC; unbalanced, because (1) we devote a signicant part of it to the 'primitive graphs and structural faults' paradigm which led to the Strong Perfect Graph Theorem (SPGT); (2) we briefly present the other "direct" attempts, that is, the ones for which results exist showing one (possible) way to the proof; (3) we ignore entirely the "indirect" approaches whose aim was to get more information about the properties and structure of perfect graphs, without a direct impact on the SPGC. Our aim in this paper is to trace the path that led to the proof of the SPGT as completely as possible. Of course, this implies large overlaps with the recent book on perfect graphs [J.L. Ramirez-Alfonsin and B.A. Reed, eds., Perfect Graphs (Wiley & Sons, 2001).], but it also implies a deeper analysis (with additional results) and another viewpoint on the topic

Induced subgraphs of graphs with large chromatic number. VII. Gyárfás' complementation conjecture

A class of graphs is χ-bounded if there is a function such that χ(G)≤f(ω(G)) for every induced subgraph G of every graph in the class, where χ,ω denote the chromatic number and clique number of G respectively. In 1987, Gyarfas conjectured that for every c, if C is a class of graphs such that χ(G)≤ω(G) +c for every induced subgraph G of every graph in the class, then the class of complements of members of C is χ-bounded. We prove this conjecture. Indeed, more generally, a class of graphs is χ-bounded if it has the property that no graph in the class has c+ 1 odd holes, pairwise disjoint and with no edges between them. The main tool is a lemma that if C is a shortest odd hole in a graph, and X is the set of vertices with at least five neighbours in V(C), then there is a three-vertex set that dominates X