No Arabic abstract
In 1972, Tutte posed the $3$-Flow Conjecture: that all $4$-edge-connected graphs have a nowhere zero $3$-flow. This was extended by Jaeger et al.(1992) to allow vertices to have a prescribed, possibly non-zero difference (modulo $3$) between the inflow and outflow. They conjectured that all $5$-edge-connected graphs with a valid prescription function have a nowhere zero $3$-flow meeting that prescription. Kochol (2001) showed that replacing $4$-edge-connected with $5$-edge-connected would suffice to prove the $3$-Flow Conjecture and Lovasz et al.(2013) showed that both conjectures hold if the edge connectivity condition is relaxed to $6$-edge-connected. Both problems are still open for $5$-edge-connected graphs. The $3$-Flow Conjecture was known to hold for planar graphs, as it is the dual of Grotzschs Colouring Theorem. Steinberg and Younger (1989) provided the first direct proof using flows for planar graphs, as well as a proof for projective planar graphs. Richter et al.(2016) provided the first direct proof using flows of the Strong $3$-Flow Conjecture for planar graphs. We prove the Strong $3$-Flow Conjecture for projective planar graphs.
A P-graph is a simple graph G which is embeddable in the real projective plane P. A (3,6)-tight P-graph is shown to be constructible from one of 8 uncontractible P-graphs by a sequence of vertex splitting moves. Also it is shown that a P-graph is minimally generically 3-rigid if and only if it is (3,6)-tight. In particular this characterisation holds for graphs that are embeddable in the M{o}bius strip.
A bridgeless graph $G$ is called $3$-flow-critical if it does not admit a nowhere-zero $3$-flow, but $G/e$ has for any $ein E(G)$. Tuttes $3$-flow conjecture can be equivalently stated as that every $3$-flow-critical graph contains a vertex of degree three. In this paper, we study the structure and extreme edge density of $3$-flow-critical graphs. We apply structure properties to obtain lower and upper bounds on the density of $3$-flow-critical graphs, that is, for any $3$-flow-critical graph $G$ on $n$ vertices, $$frac{8n-2}{5}le |E(G)|le 4n-10,$$ where each equality holds if and only if $G$ is $K_4$. We conjecture that every $3$-flow-critical graph on $nge 7$ vertices has at most $3n-8$ edges, which would be tight if true. For planar graphs, the best possible density upper bound of $3$-flow-critical graphs on $n$ vertices is $frac{5n-8}{2}$, known from a result of Kostochka and Yancey (JCTB 2014) on vertex coloring $4$-critical graphs by duality.
We apply the Discharging Method to prove the 1,2,3-Conjecture and the 1,2-Conjecture for graphs with maximum average degree less than 8/3. Stronger results on these conjectures have been proved, but this is the first application of discharging to them, and the structure theorems and reducibility results are of independent interest.
DP-coloring is a generalization of list coloring, which was introduced by Dvov{r}{a}k and Postle [J. Combin. Theory Ser. B 129 (2018) 38--54]. Zhang [Inform. Process. Lett. 113 (9) (2013) 354--356] showed that every planar graph with neither adjacent triangles nor 5-, 6-, 9-cycles is 3-choosable. Liu et al. [Discrete Math. 342 (2019) 178--189] showed that every planar graph without 4-, 5-, 6- and 9-cycles is DP-3-colorable. In this paper, we show that every planar graph with neither adjacent triangles nor 5-, 6-, 9-cycles is DP-3-colorable, which generalizes these results. Yu et al. gave three Bordeaux-type results by showing that (i) every planar graph with the distance of triangles at least three and no 4-, 5-cycles is DP-3-colorable; (ii) every planar graph with the distance of triangles at least two and no 4-, 5-, 6-cycles is DP-3-colorable; (iii) every planar graph with the distance of triangles at least two and no 5-, 6-, 7-cycles is DP-3-colorable. We also give two Bordeaux-type results in the last section: (i) every plane graph with neither 5-, 6-, 8-cycles nor triangles at distance less than two is DP-3-colorable; (ii) every plane graph with neither 4-, 5-, 7-cycles nor triangles at distance less than two is DP-3-colorable.
A graph $G$ is emph{uniquely k-colorable} if the chromatic number of $G$ is $k$ and $G$ has only one $k$-coloring up to permutation of the colors. A uniquely $k$-colorable graph $G$ is edge-critical if $G-e$ is not a uniquely $k$-colorable graph for any edge $ein E(G)$. Melnikov and Steinberg [L. S. Melnikov, R. Steinberg, One counterexample for two conjectures on three coloring, Discrete Math. 20 (1977) 203-206] asked to find an exact upper bound for the number of edges in a edge-critical 3-colorable planar graph with $n$ vertices. In this paper, we give some properties of edge-critical uniquely 3-colorable planar graphs and prove that if $G$ is such a graph with $n(geq6)$ vertices, then $|E(G)|leq frac{5}{2}n-6 $, which improves the upper bound $frac{8}{3}n-frac{17}{3}$ given by Matsumoto [N. Matsumoto, The size of edge-critical uniquely 3-colorable planar graphs, Electron. J. Combin. 20 (3) (2013) $#$P49]. Furthermore, we find some edge-critical 3-colorable planar graphs which have $n(=10,12, 14)$ vertices and $frac{5}{2}n-7$ edges.