A grounded L-graph is the intersection graph of a collection of L shapes whose topmost points belong to a common horizontal line. We prove that every grounded L-graph with clique number $omega$ has chromatic number at most $17omega^4$. This improves the doubly-exponential bound of McGuinness and generalizes the recent result that the class of circle graphs is polynomially $chi$-bounded. We also survey $chi$-boundedness problems for grounded geometric intersection graphs and give a high-level overview of recent techniques to obtain polynomial bounds.
It is proved that triangle-free intersection graphs of $n$ L-shapes in the plane have chromatic number $O(loglog n)$. This improves the previous bound of $O(log n)$ (McGuinness, 1996) and matches the known lower bound construction (Pawlik et al., 2013).
By using the Szemeredi Regularity Lemma, Alon and Sudakov recently extended the classical Andrasfai-Erd~os-Sos theorem to cover general graphs. We prove, without using the Regularity Lemma, that the following stronger statement is true. Given any (r-1)-partite graph H whose smallest part has t vertices, and any fixed c>0, there exists a constant C such that whenever G is an n-vertex graph with minimum degree at least ((3r-4)/(3r-1)+c)n, either G contains H, or we can delete at most Cn^(2-1/t) edges from G to yield an r-partite graph.
For $kgeq 1$, a $k$-colouring $c$ of $G$ is a mapping from $V(G)$ to ${1,2,ldots,k}$ such that $c(u) eq c(v)$ for any two non-adjacent vertices $u$ and $v$. The $k$-Colouring problem is to decide if a graph $G$ has a $k$-colouring. For a family of graphs ${cal H}$, a graph $G$ is ${cal H}$-free if $G$ does not contain any graph from ${cal H}$ as an induced subgraph. Let $C_s$ be the $s$-vertex cycle. In previous work (MFCS 2019) we examined the effect of bounding the diameter on the complexity of $3$-Colouring for $(C_3,ldots,C_s)$-free graphs and $H$-free graphs where $H$ is some polyad. Here, we prove for certain small values of $s$ that $3$-Colouring is polynomial-time solvable for $C_s$-free graphs of diameter $2$ and $(C_4,C_s)$-free graphs of diameter $2$. In fact, our results hold for the more general problem List $3$-Colouring. We complement these results with some hardness result for diameter $4$.
We show that graphs that do not contain a theta, pyramid, prism, or turtle as an induced subgraph have polynomially many minimal separators. This result is the best possible in the sense that there are graphs with exponentially many minimal separators if only three of the four induced subgraphs are excluded. As a consequence, there is a polynomial time algorithm to solve the maximum weight independent set problem for the class of (theta, pyramid, prism, turtle)-free graphs. Since every prism, theta, and turtle contains an even hole, this also implies a polynomial time algorithm to solve the maximum weight independent set problem for the class of (pyramid, even hole)-free graphs.
A famous conjecture of Gyarfas and Sumner states for any tree $T$ and integer $k$, if the chromatic number of a graph is large enough, either the graph contains a clique of size $k$ or it contains $T$ as an induced subgraph. We discuss some results and open problems about extensions of this conjecture to oriented graphs. We conjecture that for every oriented star $S$ and integer $k$, if the chromatic number of a digraph is large enough, either the digraph contains a clique of size $k$ or it contains $S$ as an induced subgraph. As an evidence, we prove that for any oriented star $S$, every oriented graph with sufficiently large chromatic number contains either a transitive tournament of order $3$ or $S$ as an induced subdigraph. We then study for which sets ${cal P}$ of orientations of $P_4$ (the path on four vertices) similar statements hold. We establish some positive and negative results.