A k-coloring of an oriented graph G = (V, A) is an assignment c of one of the colors 1; 2; : : : ; k to each vertex of the graph such that, for every arc (x; y) of G, c(x) 6= c(y). The k-coloring is good if for every arc (x; y) of G there is no arc (z; t) 2 A such that c(x) = c(t) and c(y) = c(z). A k-coloring is said to be semi-strong if for every vertex x of G, c(z) 6= c(t) for any pair fz; tg of vertices of N \Gamma (x). We show that every oriented planar graph has a good coloring using at most 5 \Theta 2 4 colors and that every oriented planar graph G = (V; A) with d \Gamma (x) 3 for every x 2 V has a good and semi-strong coloring using at most 4 \Theta 5 \Theta 2 4 colors.

Graph coloring has been employed since the 1980s to efficiently compute sparse Jacobian and Hessian matrices using either finite differences or automatic differentiation. Several coloring problems occur in this context, depending on whether the matrix is a Jacobian or a Hessian, and on the specifics of the computational techniques employed. We consider eight variant vertexcoloring problems here. This article begins with a gentle introduction to the problem of computing a sparse Jacobian, followed by an overview of the historical development of the research area. Then we present a unifying framework for the graph models of the variant matrixestimation problems. The framework is based upon the viewpoint that a partition of a matrixinto structurally orthogonal groups of columns corresponds to distance-2 coloring an appropriate graph representation. The unified framework helps integrate earlier work and leads to fresh insights; enables the design of more efficient algorithms for many problems; leads to new algorithms for others; and eases the task of building graph models for new problems. We report computational results on two of the coloring problems to support our claims. Most of the methods for these problems treat a column or a row of a matrixas an atomic entity, and partition the columns or rows (or both). A brief review of methods that do not fit these criteria is provided. We also discuss results in discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science that intersect with the topics considered here.

In a total order of the vertices of a graph, two edges with no endpoint in common can be crossing, nested, or disjoint. A k-stack (resp...

A star coloring of an undirected graph G is a proper vertex coloring of G (i.e., no two neighbors are assigned the same color) such that any path of length 3 in G is not bicolored. The star

Homomorphisms between graphs are studied as a generalization of colorings and of chromatic number. We investigate here homomorphisms from orientations of undirected planar graphs to graphs (not necessarily planar) containing as few digons as possible. We relate the existence of such homomorphisms to girth and it appears that these questions remain interesting even under large girth assumption in the range where the chromatic number is an easy invariant. In particular we prove that every orientation of any large girth planar graph is 5-colorable and classify those digraphs on 3, 4 and 5 vertices which color all large girth oriented planar graphs. 1 Introduction and statement of results Given graphs G = (V; E) and G 0 = (V 0 ; E 0 ) a homomorphism from G to G 0 is any mapping f : V ! V 0 satisfying [x; y] 2 E =) [f(x); f(y)] 2 E 0 : This work has been done while the author was visiting the University of Bordeaux I and was partly supported by GA CR 2167. y With the suppo...

A proper coloring of the vertices of a graph is called a star coloring if every two color classes induce a star forest. Star colorings are a strengthening of acyclic colorings, i.e., proper colorings in which every two color classes induce a forest. We show that

Acyclic and star coloring problems are specialized vertex coloring problems that arise in the efficient computation of Hessians using automatic differentiation or finite differencing, when both sparsity and symmetry are exploited. We present an algorithmic paradigm for finding heuristic solutions for these two NP-hard problems. The underlying common technique is the exploitation of the structure of two-colored induced subgraphs. For a graph G on n vertices and m edges, the time complexity of our star coloring algorithm is O(nd2), where dk, a generalization of vertex degree, denotes the average number of distinct paths of length at most k edges starting at a vertex in G. The time complexity of our acyclic coloring algorithm is larger by a multiplicative factor involving the inverse of Ackermann’s function. The space complexity of both algorithms is O(m). To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first practical algorithm for the acyclic coloring problem. For the star coloring problem, our algorithm uses fewer colors and is considerably faster than a previously known O(nd3)-time algorithm. Computational results from experiments on various large-size test graphs demonstrate that the algorithms are fast and produce highly effective solutions. The use of these algorithms in Hessian computation is expected to reduce overall runtime drastically.

Let G be a graph with chromatic number χ(G). A vertex colouring of G is acyclic if each bichromatic subgraph is a forest. A star colouring of G is an acyclic colouring in which each bichromatic subgraph is a star forest. Let χa(G) and χs(G) denote the acyclic and star chromatic numbers of G. This paper investigates acyclic and star colourings of subdivisions. Let G ′ be the graph obtained from G by subdividing each edge once. We prove that acyclic (respectively, star) colourings of G ′ correspond to vertex partitions of G in which each subgraph has small arboricity (chromatic index). It follows that χa(G ′), χs(G ′ ) and χ(G) are tied, in the sense that each is bounded by a function of the other. Moreover the binding functions that we establish are all tight. The oriented chromatic number − → χ (G) of an (undirected) graph G is the maximum, taken over all orientations D of G, of the minimum number of colours in a vertex colouring of D such that between any two colour classes, all edges have the same direction. We prove that − → χ (G ′ ) = χ(G) whenever χ(G) ≥ 9.

We prove the theorem from the title: the acyclic edge chromatic number of a random d-regular graph is asymptotically almost surely

Abstract: A proper coloring of the edges of a graph G is called acyclic if there is no 2-colored cycle in G. The acyclic edge chromatic number of G, denoted by a 0 (G), is the least number of colors in an acyclic edge coloring of G. For certain graphs G, a 0 (G) D(G) ‡ 2 where D(G) is the maximum degree in G. It is known that a 0 (G) 16 D(G) for any graph G. We prove that ÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐ