KAIST Discrete Math Seminar

The fundamental sufficient condition for the existence of a proper 3-coloring of the vertices of a planar graph G was proved by Grötzsch more than 50 years ago, and it requires that G has no triangles (cycles of length 3). This talk discusses conjectures for other possible sufficient conditions, some of which have stubbornly resisted proofs for decades, and also various recent partial results. A conjecture in a different direction deals with a stronger 3-colorability property, which for a planar graph turns out to be equivalent to triangle-freeness, but here it is unknown whether the assumption of planarity may be weakened.

The Fibonacci dimension fdim(G) of a graph G is introduced as the smallest integer f such that G admits an isometric embedding into the f-dimensional Fibonacci cube. We will see combinatorial relations between the Fibonacci dimension and the isometric or lattice dimension, and establish the Fibonacci dimension for certain families of graphs. Finally, we will discuss the problem of computing the Fibonacci dimension, namely, its NP-hardness and approximation algorithms.

Joint work with D. Eppstein and S. Klavžar. Manuscript available at arxiv:0903.2507.

Hamiltonian cycle in a graph G is a cycle, which contains every vertex of the graph G. The problem of existence of a hamiltonian cycle in a graph is a well known NP-complete problem. While some theoretical necessary and sufficient conditions are known, to date, but no practical characterization of hamiltonian graphs has been found. There are several ways how to generalize the notion of a hamiltonian cycle.

For any integer r>1, an r-trestle is a 2-connected graph F with maximum degree ∆(F)≤ r. We say that a graph G has an r-trestle if G contains a spanning subgraph which is an r-trestle. This concept can be viewed as an interesting variation on the notion of Hamilton cycle. Another such variation is a concept of k-walks, where a k-walk in a graph G is a closed spanning walk visiting each vertex at most k times, where k is a positive integer.

We present several results and problems concerning mainly with k-walks and r-trestles and relations between them.

A total coloring is a combination of a vertex coloring and an edge coloring of a graph: every vertex and every edge is assigned a color and any two adjacent/incident objects must receive distinct colors. One of the main open problems in the area of graph colorings is the Total Coloring Conjecture of Behzad and Vizing from the 1960’s asserting that every graph has a total coloring with at most D+2 colors where D is its maximum degree.

Fractional colorings are linear relaxation of ordinary colorings. In the setting of fractional total colorings, the Total Coloring Conjecture was proven by Kilakos and Reed. In the talk, we will present a proof of the following recent conjecture of Reed:

For every real ε>0 and integer D, there exists g such that every graph with maximum degree D and girth at least g has total fractional chromatic number at most D+1+ε.

For D=3 and D=4,6,8,10,…, we prove the conjecture in a stronger
form: there exists g such that every graph with maximum degree D and girth at least g has total fractional chromatic number equal to D+1.

Joint work with Tomás Kaiser, František Kardoš, Andrew King and Jean-Sébastien Sereni.

The Catalan number is perhaps the most frequently occurred number in combinatorics. Richard Stanley has collected more than 170 combinatorial objects counted by the Catalan number. Noncrossing partition, which has received great attention recently, is one of these, so called, Catalan objects. Noncrossing partitions are generalized to each finite Coxeter group. In this talk, we will interpret noncrossing partitions of type B in terms of noncrossing partitions of type A. As applications, we can prove interesting properties of noncrossing partitions of type B.