Guillaume Fertin ; André Raspaud - Acyclic Coloring of Graphs of Maximum Degree $\Delta$

dmtcs:3450 - Discrete Mathematics & Theoretical Computer Science, January 1, 2005, DMTCS Proceedings vol. AE, European Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory and Applications (EuroComb '05) - https://doi.org/10.46298/dmtcs.3450
Acyclic Coloring of Graphs of Maximum Degree $\Delta$Article

Authors: Guillaume Fertin ORCID1; André Raspaud 2

  • 1 Laboratoire d'Informatique de Nantes Atlantique
  • 2 Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique

An acyclic coloring of a graph $G$ is a coloring of its vertices such that: (i) no two neighbors in $G$ are assigned the same color and (ii) no bicolored cycle can exist in $G$. The acyclic chromatic number of $G$ is the least number of colors necessary to acyclically color $G$, and is denoted by $a(G)$. We show that any graph of maximum degree $\Delta$ has acyclic chromatic number at most $\frac{\Delta (\Delta -1) }{ 2}$ for any $\Delta \geq 5$, and we give an $O(n \Delta^2)$ algorithm to acyclically color any graph of maximum degree $\Delta$ with the above mentioned number of colors. This result is roughly two times better than the best general upper bound known so far, yielding $a(G) \leq \Delta (\Delta -1) +2$. By a deeper study of the case $\Delta =5$, we also show that any graph of maximum degree $5$ can be acyclically colored with at most $9$ colors, and give a linear time algorithm to achieve this bound.


Volume: DMTCS Proceedings vol. AE, European Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory and Applications (EuroComb '05)
Section: Proceedings
Published on: January 1, 2005
Imported on: May 10, 2017
Keywords: Acyclic chromatic number,acyclic coloring algorithm,maximum degree,[INFO.INFO-DM] Computer Science [cs]/Discrete Mathematics [cs.DM],[MATH.MATH-CO] Mathematics [math]/Combinatorics [math.CO]

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