An inertial lower bound for the chromatic number of a graph

Let $\chi(G$) and $\chi_f(G)$ denote the chromatic and fractional chromatic numbers of a graph $G$, and let $(n^+ , n^0 , n^-)$ denote the inertia of $G$. We prove that: 1 + \max\left(\frac{n^+}{n^-} , \frac{n^-}{n^+}\right) \le \chi(G) \mbox{ and conjecture that } 1 + \max\left(\frac{n^+}{n^-} , \frac{n^-}{n^+}\right) \le \chi_f(G) We investigate extremal graphs for these bounds and demonstrate that this inertial bound is not a lower bound for the vector chromatic number. We conclude with a discussion of asymmetry between $n^+$ and $n^-$, including some Nordhaus-Gaddum bounds for inertia

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

Distances and Domination in Graphs

This book presents a compendium of the 10 articles published in the recent Special Issue “Distance and Domination in Graphs”. The works appearing herein deal with several topics on graph theory that relate to the metric and dominating properties of graphs. The topics of the gathered publications deal with some new open lines of investigations that cover not only graphs, but also digraphs. Different variations in dominating sets or resolving sets are appearing, and a review on some networks’ curvatures is also present

Nordhaus–Gaddum inequalities for the fractional and circular chromatic numbers

AbstractFor a graph G on n vertices with chromatic number χ(G), the Nordhaus–Gaddum inequalities state that ⌈2n⌉≤χ(G)+χ(G¯)≤n+1, and n≤χ(G)⋅χ(G¯)≤⌊(n+12)2⌋. Much analysis has been done to derive similar inequalities for other graph parameters, all of which are integer-valued. We determine here the optimal Nordhaus–Gaddum inequalities for the circular chromatic number and the fractional chromatic number, the first examples of Nordhaus–Gaddum inequalities where the graph parameters are rational-valued