Importance: Medium ✭✭
Author(s): Wood, David R.
Subject: Graph Theory
» Coloring
Keywords: degenerate
girth
Recomm. for undergrads: yes
Posted by: David Wood
on: March 16th, 2014
Solved by: A. V. Kostochka and J. Nesetril, Properties of Descartes' construction of triangle-free graphs with high chromatic number, Combin. Prob. Comput. 8 (1999), 467-472.
Question   Does there exist a $ d $-degenerate graph with chromatic number $ d + 1 $ and girth $ g $, for all $ d \geq 2 $ and $ g \geq 3 $?

A graph is $ d $-degenerate if every subgraph has a vertex of degree at most $ d $. Such graphs are $ (d+1) $-colourable by a minimum-degree-greedy algorithm. This bound is tight for complete graphs. More interestingly, Alon-Krivelevich-Sudakov [AKS] proved that it is tight for triangle-free graphs. That is, there are $ d $-degenerate triangle-free graphs with chromatic number $ d + 1 $. Thus the answer to the above question is `yes' for $ g=4 $. Odd cycles show that the answer is `yes' for $ d=2 $ and $ g\geq 3 $. A `yes' answer for $ d\geq 2 $ and $ g\geq 4 $ would generalise the famous result of Erdős [E], who proved that there are $ k $-chromatic graphs with girth $ g $ for all $ k\geq3 $ and $ g\geq 4 $. A `no' answer would also be interesting---this would provide a non-trivial upper bound on the chromatic number of $ d $-degenerate graphs with girth $ g $.

Bibliography

[AKS] Noga Alon, Michael Krivelevich, and Benny Sudakov. Coloring graphs with sparse neighborhoods. J. Combin. Theory Ser. B 77.1:73--82, 1999.

[E] Paul Erdős, Graph theory and probability, Canad. J. Math. 11:34--38, 1959.

*[W] David R. Wood, Hypergraph Colouring and Degeneracy, arXiv:1310.2972, 2013.


* indicates original appearance(s) of problem.

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