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Hom complexes and homotopy theory in the category of graphs
We investigate a notion of -homotopy of graph maps that is based on
the internal hom associated to the categorical product in the category of
graphs. It is shown that graph -homotopy is characterized by the
topological properties of the \Hom complex, a functorial way to assign a
poset (and hence topological space) to a pair of graphs; \Hom complexes were
introduced by Lov\'{a}sz and further studied by Babson and Kozlov to give
topological bounds on chromatic number. Along the way, we also establish some
structural properties of \Hom complexes involving products and exponentials
of graphs, as well as a symmetry result which can be used to reprove a theorem
of Kozlov involving foldings of graphs. Graph -homotopy naturally leads
to a notion of homotopy equivalence which we show has several equivalent
characterizations. We apply the notions of -homotopy equivalence to the
class of dismantlable graphs to get a list of conditions that again
characterize these. We end with a discussion of graph homotopies arising from
other internal homs, including the construction of `-theory' associated to
the cartesian product in the category of reflexive graphs.Comment: 28 pages, 13 figures, final version, to be published in European J.
Com
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 -element subsets of as vertices and all pairs of
disjoint sets as edges, has chromatic number . 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 -spaces with -maps.Comment: 16 pages, 1 figure. Jahresbericht der DMV, to appea
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