Orientable edge colorings of graphs

An edge coloring of a graph is orientable if and only if it is possible to orient the edges of the graph so that the color of each edge is determined by the head of its corresponding oriented arc. The goals of this paper include finding a forbidden substructure characterization of orientable colorings and giving a linear time recognition algorithm for orientable colorings.An edge coloring is lexical if and only if it is possible to number the vertices of the graph so that the color of each edge is determined by its lower endpoint. Lexical colorings are, of course, the orientable colorings in which the underlying orientation is acyclic. Lexical colorings play an important role in Canonical Ramsey theory, and it is this standpoint that motivates the current study.     

Bounds on vertex colorings with restrictions on the union of color classes

A proper coloring of a graph is a labeled partition of its vertices into parts which are independent sets. In this paper, given a positive integer j and a family ? of connected graphs, we consider proper colorings in which we require that the union of any j color classes induces a subgraph which has no copy of any member of ?. This generalizes some well‐known types of proper colorings like acyclic colorings (where j = 2 and ?is the collection of all even cycles) and star colorings (where j = 2 and ?consists of just a path on 4 vertices), etc. For this type of coloring, we obtain an upper bound of O(d^{(k ? 1)/(k ? j)}) on the minimum number of colors sufficient to obtain such a coloring. Here, d refers to the maximum degree of the graph and k is the size of the smallest member of ?. For the case of j = 2, we also obtain lower bounds on the minimum number of colors needed in the worst case. As a corollary, we obtain bounds on the minimum number of colors sufficient to obtain proper colorings in which the union of any j color classes is a graph of bounded treewidth. In particular, using O(d^8/7) colors, one can obtain a proper coloring of the vertices of a graph so that the union of any two color classes has treewidth at most 2. We also show that this bound is tight within a multiplicative factor of O((logd)^1/7). We also consider generalizations where we require simultaneously for several pairs (j_i, ?_i) (i = 1, …, l) that the union of any j_i color classes has no copy of any member of ?_i and obtain upper bounds on the corresponding chromatic numbers. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Graph Theory 66: 213–234, 2011     

The skew chromatic index of a graph

We define a skew edge coloring of a graph to be a set of two edge colorings such that no two edges are assigned the same unordered pair of colors. The skew chromatic index s(G) is the minimum number of colors required for a skew edge coloring of G. We show that this concept is closely related to that of skew Room squares and use this relation to prove that s(G) is at most o(G) + 4. We also find better upper bounds for s(G) when G is cyclic, cubic, or bipartite. In particular we use a construction involving Latin squares to show that if G is complete bipartite of order 2n, s(G) is bounded above by roughly $\text{3n}\text{2}$.     

Regular and canonical colorings

A general framework for coloring problems is described; the concept of regular coloring is introduced; it simply means that one specifies in each edge the maximum and the minimum number of nodes which may have the same color.For several types of regular colorings, one defines canonical colorings where colors form an ordered set and where one always tries to use first the “smallest” colors. It is shown that for some classes of multigraphs including bipartite multigraphs, regular edge colorings corresponding to maximal color feasible sequences are canonical.     

Perfect 2-colorings of a hypercube

A coloring of the vertices of a graph is called perfect if the multiset of colors of all neighbors of a vertex depends only on its own color. We study the possible parameters of perfect 2-colorings of the n-dimensional cube. Some necessary conditions are obtained for existence of such colorings. A new recursive construction of such colorings is found, which produces colorings for all known and infinitely many new parameter sets.     

Colorings of plane graphs: A survey

After a brief historical account, a few simple structural theorems about plane graphs useful for coloring are stated, and two simple applications of discharging are given. Afterwards, the following types of proper colorings of plane graphs are discussed, both in their classical and choosability (list coloring) versions: simultaneous colorings of vertices, edges, and faces (in all possible combinations, including total coloring), edge-coloring, cyclic coloring (all vertices in any small face have different colors), 3-coloring, acyclic coloring (no 2-colored cycles), oriented coloring (homomorphism of directed graphs to small tournaments), a special case of circular coloring (the colors are points of a small cycle, and the colors of any two adjacent vertices must be nearly opposite on this cycle), 2-distance coloring (no 2-colored paths on three vertices), and star coloring (no 2-colored paths on four vertices). The only improper coloring discussed is injective coloring (any two vertices having a common neighbor should have distinct colors).     

Circular list colorings of some graphs

The circular list coloring is a circular version of list colorings of graphs. Let χinc,l denote the circular choosability(or the circular list chromatic number). In this paper, the circular choosability of outer planar graphs and odd wheel is discussed.     

On d-diagonal colorings

A coloring of a graph embedded on a surface is d-diagonal if any pair of vertices that are in the same face after the deletion of at most d edges of the graph must be colored differently. Hornak and Jendrol introduced d-diagonal colorings as a generalization of cyclic colorings and diagonal colorings. This paper proves a conjecture of Hornak and Jendrol that plane quadrangulations have d-diagonal colorings with at most 1 + 2 · 3^d+1 colors. A similar result is proven for plane triangulations. Each of these results extends to the projective plane. Also, a lower bound for the d-diagonal chromatic number is given. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Cyclic 4‐Colorings of Graphs on Surfaces

To attack the Four Color Problem, in 1880, Tait gave a necessary and sufficient condition for plane triangulations to have a proper 4‐vertex‐coloring: a plane triangulation G has a proper 4‐vertex‐coloring if and only if the dual of G has a proper 3‐edge‐coloring. A cyclic coloring of a map G on a surface F² is a vertex‐coloring of G such that any two vertices x and y receive different colors if x and y are incident with a common face of G. In this article, we extend the result by Tait to two directions, that is, considering maps on a nonspherical surface and cyclic 4‐colorings.     

Rainbow and monochromatic circuits and cocircuits in binary matroids

Given a matroid together with a coloring of its ground set, a subset of its elements is called rainbow colored if no two of its elements have the same color. We show that if an n-element rank r binary matroid M is colored with exactly r colors, then M either contains a rainbow colored circuit or a monochromatic cocircuit. As the class of binary matroids is closed under taking duals, this immediately implies that if M is colored with exactly $n?r$ colors, then M either contains a rainbow colored cocircuit or a monochromatic circuit. As a byproduct, we give a characterization of binary matroids in terms of reductions to partition matroids.Motivated by a conjecture of Bérczi, Schwarcz and Yamaguchi, we also analyze the relation between the covering number of a binary matroid and the maximum number of colors or the maximum size of a color class in any of its rainbow circuit-free colorings. For simple graphic matroids, we show that there exists a rainbow circuit-free coloring that uses each color at most twice only if the graph is $(2,3)$-sparse, that is, it is independent in the 2-dimensional rigidity matroid. Furthermore, we give a complete characterization of minimally rigid graphs admitting such a coloring.     

On splittable colorings of graphs and hypergraphs

The notion of a split coloring of a complete graph was introduced by Erd?s and Gyárfás [ 7 ] as a generalization of split graphs. In this work, we offer an alternate interpretation by comparing such a coloring to the classical Ramsey coloring problem via a two‐round game played against an adversary. We show that the techniques used and bounds obtained on the extremal (r,m)‐split coloring problem of [ 7 ] are closer in nature to the Turán theory of graphs rather than Ramsey theory. We extend the notion of these colorings to hypergraphs and provide bounds and some exact results. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Graph Theory 40: 226–237, 2002     

Graph unique-maximum and conflict-free colorings

We investigate the relationship between two kinds of vertex colorings of graphs: unique-maximum colorings and conflict-free colorings. In a unique-maximum coloring, the colors are ordered, and in every path of the graph the maximum color appears only once. In a conflict-free coloring, in every path of the graph there is a color that appears only once. We also study computational complexity aspects of conflict-free colorings and prove a completeness result. Finally, we improve lower bounds for those chromatic numbers of the grid graph.     

Ramsey‐type results for Gallai colorings

A Gallai‐coloring of a complete graph is an edge coloring such that no triangle is colored with three distinct colors. Gallai‐colorings occur in various contexts such as the theory of partially ordered sets (in Gallai's original paper) or information theory. Gallai‐colorings extend 2‐colorings of the edges of complete graphs. They actually turn out to be close to 2‐colorings—without being trivial extensions. Here, we give a method to extend some results on 2‐colorings to Gallai‐colorings, among them known and new, easy and difficult results. The method works for Gallai‐extendible families that include, for example, double stars and graphs of diameter at most d for 2?d, or complete bipartite graphs. It follows that every Gallai‐colored K_n contains a monochromatic double star with at least 3n+ 1/4 vertices, a monochromatic complete bipartite graph on at least n/2 vertices, monochromatic subgraphs of diameter two with at least 3n/4 vertices, etc. The generalizations are not automatic though, for instance, a Gallai‐colored complete graph does not necessarily contain a monochromatic star on n/2 vertices. It turns out that the extension is possible for graph classes closed under a simple operation called equalization. We also investigate Ramsey numbers of graphs in Gallai‐colorings with a given number of colors. For any graph H let RG(r, H) be the minimum m such that in every Gallai‐coloring of K_m with r colors, there is a monochromatic copy of H. We show that for fixed H, RG (r, H) is exponential in r if H is not bipartite; linear in r if H is bipartite but not a star; constant (does not depend on r) if H is a star (and we determine its value). © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Graph Theory 64: 233–243, 2010     

On periodicity of perfect colorings of the infinite hexagonal and triangular grids

A coloring of vertices of a graph G is called r-perfect, if the color structure of each ball of radius r in G depends only on the color of the center of the ball. The parameters of a perfect coloring are given by the matrix A = (a _ij ) _i,j=1 ⁿ , where n is the number of colors and a _ij is the number of vertices of color j in a ball centered at a vertex of color i. We study the periodicity of perfect colorings of the graphs of the infinite hexagonal and triangular grids. We prove that for every 1-perfect coloring of the infinite triangular and every 1- and 2-perfect coloring of the infinite hexagonal grid there exists a periodic perfect coloring with the same matrix. The periodicity of perfect colorings of big radii have been studied earlier.     

Maximizing and minimizing the number of generalized colorings of trees

We classify the trees on $n$ vertices with the maximum and the minimum number of certain generalized colorings, including conflict-free, odd, non-monochromatic, star, and star rainbow vertex colorings. We also extend a result of Cutler and Radcliffe on the maximum and minimum number of existence homomorphisms from a tree to a completely looped graph on $q$ vertices.     

On Group Choosability of Total Graphs

In this paper, we study the group and list group colorings of total graphs and present group coloring versions of the total and list total colorings conjectures. We establish the group coloring version of the total coloring conjecture for the following classes of graphs: graphs with small maximum degree, two-degenerate graphs, planner graphs with maximum degree at least 11, planner graphs without certain small cycles, outerplanar graphs and near outerplanar graphs with maximum degree at least 4. In addition, the group version of the list total coloring conjecture is established for forests, outerplanar graphs and graphs with maximum degree at most two.     

A note on strong perfectness of graphs

In (strongly) perfect graphs, we define (strongly) canonical colorings; we show that for some classes of graphs, such colorings can be obtained by sequential coloring techniques. Chromatic properties ofP ₄-free graphs based on such coloring techniques are mentioned and extensions to graphs containing no inducedP ₅, orC ₅ are presented. In particular we characterize the class of graphs in which any maximal (or minimal) nodex in the vicinal preorder has the following property: there is either noP ₄ havingx as a midpoint or noP ₄ havingx as an endpoint. For such graphs, according to a result of Chvatal, there is a simple sequential coloring algorithm.     

Non-independent randomized rounding and coloring

We propose an advanced randomized coloring algorithm for the problem of balanced colorings of hypergraphs (discrepancy problem). Instead of independently coloring the vertices with a random color, we try to use structural information about the hypergraph in the design of the random experiment by imposing suitable dependencies. This yields colorings having smaller discrepancy. We also obtain more information about the coloring, or, conversely, we may enforce the random coloring to have special properties. There are some algorithmic advantages as well.We apply our approach to hypergraphs of d-dimensional boxes and to finite geometries. Among others results, we gain a factor 2^d/2 decrease in the discrepancy of the boxes, and reduce the number of random bits needed to generate good colorings for the geometries down to (from n). The latter also speeds up the corresponding derandomization by a factor of .