Our proof (with Robertson and Thomas) of the strong perfect graph conjecture ran to 179 pages of dense matter; and the most impenetrable part was the final 55 pages, on what we called “wheel systems”. In this paper we give a replacement for those 55 pages, much easier and shorter, using “even pairs”. This is based on an approach of Maffray and Trotignon.

18 until the number of vertices left is O(n=d), and color the remaining vertices in an arbitrary manner. 7. The existence of an approximation algorithm based on the spectral method for coloring arbitrary graphs is a question that deserves further investigation (which we do not address here.) Recently, improved approximation algorithms for graph coloring have been obtained using semideenite prog...

A c-ary Perfect Factor is a set of uniformly long cycles whose elements are drawn from a set of size c, in which every possible v-tuple of elements occurs exactly once. In the binary case, i.e. where c = 2, these perfect factors have previously been studied by Etzion, [2], who showed that the obvious necessary conditions for their existence are in fact sufficient. This result has recently been ...

Dvo?ák and Postle introduced the concept of DP-coloring to overcome some difficulties in list coloring. Sittitrai Nakprasit combined defective coloring define a new coloring—relaxed DP-coloring. For relaxed DP-coloring, Sribunhung et al. proved that planar graphs without 4- 7-cycles are DP-(0, 2, 2)-colorable. Li 4, 8-cycles or 9-cycles DP-(1, 1, 1)-colorable. Lu Zhu 5-cycles, 6-cycles, In this...

The Strong Perfect Graph Conjecture (SPGC) was certainly one of the most challenging conjectures in graph theory. During more than four decades, numerous attempts were made to solve it, by combinatorial methods, by linear algebraic methods, or by polyhedral methods. The rst of these three approaches yielded the rst (and to date only) proof of the SPGC; the other two remain promising to consider...

The construction of joins and secant varieties is studied in the combinatorial context of monomial ideals. For ideals generated by quadratic monomials, the generators of the secant ideals are obstructions to graph colorings, and this leads to a commutative algebra version of the Strong Perfect Graph Theorem. Given any projective variety and any term order, we explore whether the initial ideal o...

A total coloring of a graph G is a coloring of all elements of G, i.e. vertices and edges, such that no two adjacent or incident elements receive the same color. Let L(x) be a set of colors assigned to each element x of G. Then a list total coloring of G is a total coloring such that each element x receives a color contained in L(x). The list total coloring problem asks whether G has a list tot...