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Graph coloring
In  graph theory,  graph coloring  is a special case of  graph
labeling; it is an assignment of labels traditionally called "colors"
to elements of a  graph  subject to certain constraints. In its
simplest form, it is a way of coloring the vertices of a graph such
that no two adjacent vertices are of the same color; this is called
a vertex coloring. Similarly, an edge coloring assigns a color to
each edge so that no two adjacent edges are of the same color, and
a face coloring of a planar graph assigns a color to each face or
region so that no two faces that share a boundary have the same
color.

Vertex coloring is usually used to introduce graph coloring

problems since other coloring problems can be transformed into a A proper vertex coloring of
vertex coloring instance. For example, an edge coloring of a graph the Petersen graph with 3 colors,
is just a vertex coloring of its  line graph, and a face coloring of the minimum number possible.
a  plane graphis just a vertex coloring of its  dual. However, non-
vertex coloring problems are often stated and studied as is. This is
partly pedagogical, and partly because some problems are best studied in their non-vertex form, as in
the case of edge coloring.

The convention of using colors originates from coloring the countries of a map, where each face is
literally colored. This was generalized to coloring the faces of a graph  embedded  in the plane. By
planar duality it became coloring the vertices, and in this form it generalizes to all graphs. In
mathematical and computer representations, it is typical to use the first few positive or non-negative
integers as the "colors". In general, one can use any finite set as the "color set". The nature of the
coloring problem depends on the number of colors but not on what they are.

Graph coloring enjoys many practical applications as well as theoretical challenges. Beside the
classical types of problems, different limitations can also be set on the graph, or on the way a color is
assigned, or even on the color itself. It has even reached popularity with the general public in the form
of the popular number puzzle Sudoku. Graph coloring is still a very active field of research.

Note: Many terms used in this article are defined in Glossary of graph theory.

Contents
History
Definition and terminology
Vertex coloring
Chromatic polynomial
Edge coloring
Total coloring
Unlabeled coloring
Properties
Bounds on the chromatic number
Lower bounds on the chromatic number
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Graphs with high chromatic number

Bounds on the chromatic index
Other properties
Open problems
Algorithms
Polynomial time
Exact algorithms
Contraction
Greedy coloring
Parallel and distributed algorithms
Decentralized algorithms
Computational complexity
Applications
Scheduling
Register allocation
Other applications
Other colorings
Ramsey theory
Other colorings
See also
Notes
References
External links

History
The first results about graph coloring deal almost exclusively with  planar graphs  in the form of the
coloring of maps. While trying to color a map of the counties of England, Francis Guthrie postulated
the four color conjecture, noting that four colors were sufficient to color the map so that no regions
sharing a common border received the same color. Guthrie’s brother passed on the question to his
mathematics teacher  Augustus de Morgan  at  University College, who mentioned it in a letter
to  William Hamilton  in 1852.  Arthur Cayley  raised the problem at a meeting of the  London
Mathematical Society  in 1879. The same year,  Alfred Kempe  published a paper that claimed to
establish the result, and for a decade the four color problem was considered solved. For his
accomplishment Kempe was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and later President of the London
Mathematical Society.[1]

In 1890, Heawood pointed out that Kempe’s argument was wrong. However, in that paper he proved
the  five color theorem, saying that every planar map can be colored with no more than  five  colors,
using ideas of Kempe. In the following century, a vast amount of work and theories were developed to
reduce the number of colors to four, until the four color theorem was finally proved in 1976
by Kenneth Appeland Wolfgang Haken. The proof went back to the ideas of Heawood and Kempe and
largely disregarded the intervening developments.[2]  The proof of the four color theorem is also
noteworthy for being the first major computer-aided proof.

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In 1912, George David Birkhoff introduced the chromatic polynomial to study the coloring problems,

which was generalised to the  Tutte polynomial  by  Tutte, important structures in  algebraic graph
theory. Kempe had already drawn attention to the general, non-planar case in 1879,[3]  and many
results on generalisations of planar graph coloring to surfaces of higher order followed in the early
20th century.

In 1960, Claude Berge formulated another conjecture about graph coloring, the strong perfect graph
conjecture, originally motivated by an information-theoretic concept called the zero-error capacity of a
graph introduced by  Shannon. The conjecture remained unresolved for 40 years, until it was
established as the celebrated  strong perfect graph theorem  by  Chudnovsky,  Robertson,  Seymour,
and Thomas in 2002.

Graph coloring has been studied as an algorithmic problem since the early 1970s: the chromatic
number problem is one of Karp’s 21 NP-complete problems from 1972, and at approximately the same
time various exponential-time algorithms were developed based on backtracking and on the deletion-
contraction recurrence of  Zykov (1949). One of the major applications of graph coloring,  register
allocation in compilers, was introduced in 1981.

Definition and terminology

Vertex coloring

When used without any qualification, a  coloring  of a graph is

almost always a proper vertex coloring, namely a labeling of the
graph’s vertices with colors such that no two vertices sharing the
same edge have the same color. Since a vertex with a  loop  (i.e. a
connection directly back to itself) could never be properly colored,
it is understood that graphs in this context are loopless.

The terminology of using colors for vertex labels goes back to map This graph can be 3-colored in 12
coloring. Labels like red and blue are only used when the number different ways.
of colors is small, and normally it is understood that the labels are
drawn from the integers {1, 2, 3, ...}.

A coloring using at most  k  colors is called a (proper)  k-coloring. The smallest number of colors
needed to color a graph G is called its  chromatic number, and is often denoted χ(G). Sometimes
γ(G) is used, since χ(G) is also used to denote the Euler characteristic of a graph. A graph that can be
assigned a (proper)  k-coloring is  k-colorable, and it is  k-chromatic  if its chromatic number is
exactly k. A subset of vertices assigned to the same color is called a color class, every such class forms
an independent set. Thus, a k-coloring is the same as a partition of the vertex set into k independent
sets, and the terms k-partite and k-colorable have the same meaning.

Chromatic polynomial

The chromatic polynomial counts the number of ways a graph can be colored using no more than a
given number of colors. For example, using three colors, the graph in the adjacent image can be
colored in 12 ways. With only two colors, it cannot be colored at all. With four colors, it can be colored
in 24 + 4⋅12 = 72 ways: using all four colors, there are 4! = 24 valid colorings (every assignment of four

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colors to  any  4-vertex graph is a proper coloring); and for every
choice of three of the four colors, there are 12 valid 3-colorings. So,
for the graph in the example, a table of the number of valid colorings
would start like this:

Available colors 1 2 3 4 …
Number of colorings 0 0 12 72 …

The chromatic polynomial is a function  P(G,  t) that counts the

number of t-colorings of G. As the name indicates, for a given G  the
function is indeed a  polynomial  in  t. For the example
graph, P(G, t) = t(t − 1)2(t − 2), and indeed P(G, 4) = 72.

The chromatic polynomial includes at least as much information

about the colorability of G as does the chromatic number. Indeed, χ
is the smallest positive integer that is not a root of the chromatic
polynomial

All non-isomorphic graphs on 3

vertices and their chromatic
polynomials. The empty
graph E3 (red) admits a 1-
coloring; the others admit no
such colorings. The green graph
admits 12 colorings with 3
colors.

Chromatic polynomials for certain graphs

Triangle K3

Complete graph Kn

Tree with n vertices

Cycle Cn

Petersen graph

Edge coloring

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An edge coloring of a graph is a proper coloring of the edges, meaning an assignment of colors to

edges so that no vertex is incident to two edges of the same color. An edge coloring with  k  colors is
called a k-edge-coloring and is equivalent to the problem of partitioning the edge set into k matchings.
The smallest number of colors needed for an edge coloring of a graph  G  is the  chromatic index,
or edge chromatic number, χ′(G). A Tait coloring is a 3-edge coloring of a cubic graph. The four
color theorem  is equivalent to the assertion that every planar cubic  bridgeless  graph admits a Tait
coloring.

Total coloring

Total coloring  is a type of coloring on the vertices  and  edges of a graph. When used without any
qualification, a total coloring is always assumed to be proper in the sense that no adjacent vertices, no
adjacent edges, and no edge and its end-vertices are assigned the same color. The total chromatic
number χ″(G) of a graph G is the fewest colors needed in any total coloring of G.

Unlabeled coloring

An unlabeled coloring of a graph is an  orbit  of a coloring under the action of the  automorphism
groupof the graph. If we interpret a coloring of a graph on   vertices as a vector in  , the action of an
automorphism is a  permutation  of the coefficients of the coloring. There are analogues of
the  chromatic polynomials  which count the number of unlabeled colorings of a graph from a given
finite color set.

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