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Kr-Free Uniquely Vertex Colorable Graphs with Minimum Possible Edges

✍ Scribed by S. Akbari; V.S. Mirrokni; B.S. Sadjad


Publisher
Elsevier Science
Year
2001
Tongue
English
Weight
112 KB
Volume
82
Category
Article
ISSN
0095-8956

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✦ Synopsis


We construct counterexamples to the conjecture of Xu (1990, J. Combin. Theory Ser. B 50, 319 320) that every uniquely r-colorable graph of order n with exactly (r&1) n&( r2 ) edges must contain a K r .

2001 Academic Press

Harary et al.

[4] constructed uniquely r-colorable graphs containing no K r . Nes etr il [5], Artzy and Erdo s [3], and Bolloba s and Sauer [1] independently showed that there exist uniquely r-colorable graphs of girth g, for all r, g 3. It is easily shown that a uniquely r-colorable graph of order n must have at least (r&1) n&( r 2 ) edges. Xu [6] conjectured that equality can hold only if the graph contains a K r . The aim of this paper is to give counterexamples to Xu's Conjecture.

Before constructing our examples let us introduce some necessary notations and definitions. A graph G is said to be uniquely r-colorable if it is r-colorable and any r-coloring of the vertices gives the same color classes. An r-UVC graph denotes a uniquely r-colorable graph. Let G be a graph with order n and size m and chromatic number r; then we define the Shaoji number of G as SH(G)=(r&1) n&( r 2 ). First, in the following theorem we give a K 3 -free, 3-UVC graph of order 24 such that SH(G) is equal to the size of G.

Theorem. There exists a K 3 -free uniquely 3-colorable graph G with 24 vertices and SH(G)=45 edges.

Proof. Our proof is based on a computer search. In the following steps we will explain our construction using the graph G 1 (see Fig. 1), which