Graph coloring

Article summary

with 3 colors, the minimum number possible. In graph theory, graph coloring is a methodic assignment of labels traditionally called "colors" to elements of a graph. The assignment is subject to certain constraints, such as that no two adjacent elements have the same color. Graph coloring is a special case of graph labeling. 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 often used to introduce graph coloring problems, since other coloring problems can be transformed into a vertex coloring instance. For example, an edge coloring of a graph is just a vertex coloring of its line graph, and a face coloring of a plane graph is 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 in a political map, where each face is literally colored.…

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