Colloquium Announcement
Department of Mathematics
West Virginia University

for

Thursday, October 1,1998, at 3:45pm in 315 Armstrong Hall

(Tea and cookies begin at 3:00 in coffee room.)

Professor Cunquan Zhang

WVU


Edge-coloring, cycle cover and Fulkerson Conjecture

The talk will be suitable for a general audience.

Students are strongly encouraged to participate.

Abstract


Let G be a graph. An edge-coloring of G is a coloring of the edge set of G such that every pair of adjacent edges are colored differently. It is known that not every 3-regular graph is edge-3-colorable. The following is one the most well-known open problem in graph theory:

Fulkerson Conjecture. Let G be a bridgeless 3-regular graph. Then 2G is edge-6-colorable, where, 2G is the graph obtained from G by replaying each edge with a pair of parallel edges.

In this talk, we will present a few approaches to this open problem, such as, multi-edge-coloring, perfect matching cover and matching cover, even subgraph cover, etc. A few relaxations of the conjecture will also be presented.


The information on the future (and past) Colloquia can be also found on web at the address:

http://www.math.wvu.edu/homepages/kcies/colloquium.html