On the Strong Parity Chromatic Number

International audienceA vertex colouring of a 2-connected plane graph G is a strong parity vertex colouring if for every face f and each colour c, the number of vertices incident with f coloured by c is either zero or odd. Czap et al. [Discrete Math. 311 (2011) 512-520] proved that every 2-connected plane graph has a proper strong parity vertex colouring with at most 118 colours. In this paper we improve this upper bound for some classes of plane graphs

Parity vertex colouring of plane graphs

AbstractA proper vertex colouring of a 2-connected plane graph G is a parity vertex colouring if for each face f and each colour c, either no vertex or an odd number of vertices incident with f is coloured with c. The minimum number of colours used in such a colouring of G is denoted by χp(G).In this paper, we prove that χp(G)≤118 for every 2-connected plane graph G

On the Strong Parity Chromatic Number

International audienceA vertex colouring of a 2-connected plane graph G is a strong parity vertex colouring if for every face f and each colour c, the number of vertices incident with f coloured by c is either zero or odd. Czap et al. [Discrete Math. 311 (2011) 512-520] proved that every 2-connected plane graph has a proper strong parity vertex colouring with at most 118 colours. In this paper we improve this upper bound for some classes of plane graphs

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

Integration and conjugacy in knot theory

This thesis consists of three self-contained chapters. The first two concern quantum invariants of links and three manifolds and the third contains results on the word problem for link groups. In chapter 1 we relate the tree part of the Aarhus integral to the mu-invariants of string-links in homology balls thus generalizing results of Habegger and Masbaum. There is a folklore result in physics saying that the Feynman integration of an exponential is itself an exponential. In chapter 2 we state and prove an exact formulation of this statement in the language which is used in the theory of finite type invariants. The final chapter is concerned with properties of link groups. In particular we study the relationship between known solutions from small cancellation theory and normal surface theory for the word and conjugacy problems of the groups of (prime) alternating links. We show that two of the algorithms in the literature for solving the word problem, each using one of the two approaches, are the same. Then, by considering small cancellation methods, we give a normal surface solution to the conjugacy problem of these link groups and characterize the conjugacy classes. Finally as an application of the small cancellation properties of link groups we give a new proof that alternating links are non-trivial.Comment: University of Warwick Ph.D. thesi