Republic of the Philippines

Laguna State Polytechnic University

San Pablo City Campus

Brgy. Del Remedio, San Pablo City

College of Teacher Education

GEC 104: Mathematics in the Modern World

Name of Facilitator: Earl Joseph C. Trinidad

Section: BTVTED 1-Q

Professor: Dr. Agripina Banayo

Graph Coloring A graph coloring is an assignment of labels, called

colors, to the vertices of a graph such that no two adjacent vertices
share the same color. The chromatic number of a graph is the minimal
number of colors for which such an assignment is possible. Other
types of colorings on graphs also exist, most notably edge colorings
that may be subject to various constraints.

Coloring Map

 In the mid-1800s, Francis Guthrie was trying to color a map of

the countries of England. It would be easy to distinguish the
countries, he wanted countries sharing a common boarder to
have different colors.

 After several attempts, he noticed that four colors were

required to color the map.

 This observation became known as the four color problem.

 There is a connection between coloring maps and graph theory.

 Has many practical applications, from scheduling tasks, to

designing computers, to playing Sudoku.
Example of graph coloring

Sherry is a manager at MathDyn Inc. and is attempting to get a training

schedule in place for some new employees. There are four meetings
to be scheduled, and she wants to use as few time slots as possible
for the meetings. However, if an employee has to be at two different
meetings, then those meetings must be scheduled at different times.
To get a visual representation of this, Sherry represents the meetings
with dots, and if two meetings have an employee that needs to be at
both of them, they are connected by an edge.

She then lets colors represent different time slots, and colors the dots
with these colors so that no two dots that share an edge (that is, have
an employee that needs to be at both) have the same color (the same
time slot). A couple of ways to do this are shown in the image

In graph theory, the collection of dots and lines is called a graph. The
dots are called vertices, and the lines between them are called
edges. Coloring the vertices in the way that was illustrated (no two
vertices that share an edge have the same color) is called a proper
coloring of the graph.
The chromatic number of a graph is the minimum number of colors
needed to produce a proper coloring of a graph. In our scheduling
example, the chromatic number of the graph would be the minimum
number of time slots needed to schedule the meetings so there are no
time conflicts.

This scheduling example is a simple example, so we can find the

chromatic number of the graph just using inspection. If we start by
coloring vertex A with the color red, then we can see that vertices B
and C must be a different color than this since they share an edge with
A. Furthermore, B and C also share an edge, so they have to be
different colors as well, say blue and green. The only vertex left is D,
and we see that it shares an edge with both B and C, so it can't be
blue or green, but it does not share an edge with A, so it can be red.

We can't use less than 3 colors without two vertices sharing an edge
having the same color. Therefore, the chromatic number of the graph
is 3, and Sherry should schedule meetings during 3 time slots.