On vertex coloring without monochromatic triangles

We study a certain relaxation of the classic vertex coloring problem, namely, a coloring of vertices of undirected, simple graphs, such that there are no monochromatic triangles. We give the first classification of the problem in terms of classic and parametrized algorithms. Several computational complexity results are also presented, which improve on the previous results found in the literature. We propose the new structural parameter for undirected, simple graphs -- the triangle-free chromatic number $\chi_3$. We bound $\chi_3$ by other known structural parameters. We also present two classes of graphs with interesting coloring properties, that play pivotal role in proving useful observation about our problem. We give/ask several conjectures/questions throughout this paper to encourage new research in the area of graph coloring.Comment: Extended abstrac

Vertex coloring of plane graphs with nonrepetitive boundary paths

A sequence $s_1,s_2,...,s_k,s_1,s_2,...,s_k$ is a repetition. A sequence $S$ is nonrepetitive, if no subsequence of consecutive terms of $S$ form a repetition. Let $G$ be a vertex colored graph. A path of $G$ is nonrepetitive, if the sequence of colors on its vertices is nonrepetitive. If $G$ is a plane graph, then a facial nonrepetitive vertex coloring of $G$ is a vertex coloring such that any facial path is nonrepetitive. Let $\pi_f(G)$ denote the minimum number of colors of a facial nonrepetitive vertex coloring of $G$. Jendro\vl and Harant posed a conjecture that $\pi_f(G)$ can be bounded from above by a constant. We prove that $\pi_f(G)\le 24$ for any plane graph $G$

Parameterized Complexity of Equitable Coloring

A graph on $n$ vertices is equitably $k$-colorable if it is $k$-colorable and every color is used either $\left\lfloor n/k \right\rfloor$ or $\left\lceil n/k \right\rceil$ times. Such a problem appears to be considerably harder than vertex coloring, being $\mathsf{NP\text{-}Complete}$ even for cographs and interval graphs. In this work, we prove that it is $\mathsf{W[1]\text{-}Hard}$ for block graphs and for disjoint union of split graphs when parameterized by the number of colors; and $\mathsf{W[1]\text{-}Hard}$ for $K_{1,4}$-free interval graphs when parameterized by treewidth, number of colors and maximum degree, generalizing a result by Fellows et al. (2014) through a much simpler reduction. Using a previous result due to Dominique de Werra (1985), we establish a dichotomy for the complexity of equitable coloring of chordal graphs based on the size of the largest induced star. Finally, we show that \textsc{equitable coloring} is $\mathsf{FPT}$ when parameterized by the treewidth of the complement graph