Graph Coloring

Central High School

• Below is an organizational table of

the students who hold offices in the
clubs at Central High School.

Math Honor Science Art Pep Spanish

Club Club Club Club Club Club
Matt X X X -- -- --

Marty X -- -- X X --

Kim -- X -- -- -- X

Lois X -- X -- -- --

Dot X -- -- -- X --
Club Meetings
• If each club at Central High wants
to meet once a week, since several
members hold offices in more than
one organization, the schedules
will have to be arranged so that the
meeting days are scheduled for
several days.
• Is it possible to come up with such
a schedule?
• What is the minimum number of
days needed for the schedule?
Solving the Problem
• One way to solve this problem
would be to use 5 days for the
scheduling.
• Notice that the Math and Spanish
Clubs meet of Monday and the
remaining clubs could meet on the
other 4 days.
• If the problem is to schedule the
meetings in the fewest number of
days, then this solution is not
optimal.
• It is possible to create a schedule
using only 3 days.
Trial by Error
• Finding that schedule by trial and
error for this problem would not be
too difficult, but a mathematical
model would be helpful for more
complicated problems.
• We could construct a graph in
which the vertices represent clubs
at Central High School and the
edges indicate that the clubs share
an officer and so can not meet on
the same night.
• Such a graph would look like:
Club Graph

Math Honor

Spanish

Science Art Pep

Labeling the Days
• Now we can begin by labeling the
graph with the days of the week
that the clubs can meet on.
• Adjacent vertices must have
different labels, since this is where
the conflicts occur.
• One ways of assigning days to
begin with the Math Club and
labeling it Monday.
• Since no one belongs to both the
Math Club and the Spanish Club,
the Spanish Club can also be
labeled with Monday.
Labeling the Days (cont’d)
• We will also label the Honor Club
with Tuesday.
• The Pep Club or the Art Club, but
not both, can receive a Tuesday
label.
• The other label is placed with
Wednesday.
• The Science Club can also receive a
Wednesday label.
• The resulting schedule is an
optimal solution to the problem,
but notice that it is not unique.
Coloring Problems
• Problems of this type are called
coloring problems.
• They are called this because historically
the labels placed on the vertices of the
graphs were called colors.
• The process of labeling the graph is
referred to as coloring the graph.
• The minimum number of labels or colors
that can be used is known as the
chromatic number of the graph.
• The chromatic number for the graph we
just completed is three.
The Four-Color Conjecture
•This type of problem attracted the
attention of several 19th century
mathematicians such as Augustus de
Morgan, William Rowan Hamilton
and Arthur Cayley.
•They became interested in the Augustus de Morgan
problem because of the four-color
conjecture.
•This conjecture stated that any map
that could be drawn on the surface
of a sphere could be colored with,
at most, four colors.

Arthur Cayley
Four-Color Conjecture
• This problem intrigued
mathematicians for over 100 years.
• During that time many tried prove
the conjecture but flaws were
always found in the proofs.
• It wasn’t until 1976 that Kenneth
Appel and Wolfgang Haken of U of
Illinois actually solved the problem,
that the four-color conjecture
became the four-color theorem.
• They proved this theorem in a very
different way than all the other
proofs had been attempted.
Appel and Haken’s Proof
• They proved their theorem using a
high-speed computer a first for the
field of mathematics.
• When the proof was completed,
they had used over 1,200 hours of
time on three different computers.
• The honor them the University of
Illinois had a postage meter stamp
created.
Map Coloring
• One way to approach map coloring
is to represent each region of the
map with a vertex of a graph.
• Two vertices are connected with an
edge if the regions they represent
have a common border.
• Coloring the map is then the same
process as coloring the vertices of a
graph so that adjacent vertices
have different colors.
Example
• Color the following map using four
of fewer colors:

A
D

C E
B
Finding the Solution
• To find a solution, represent the
map with a graph in which each
vertex represents a region of the
map, and draw edges between
vertices if the regions on the map
have a common border. Then label
the graph with a minimum number
of colors.
A (red) B (yellow)

C (green)

(blue) D
Coloring the Graph
• The colored graph would look like
this:

A
D

C B
C E
B
Practice Problems
1. Find the chromatic number for
each of the graphs below:
a. b.

c.
Practice Problems (cont’d)
2. a. Draw a graph that has four
vertices and a chromatic number
of three.
b. Draw a graph that has four
vertices and a chromatic number
of one.

As the number of vertices in a

graph increases, a systematic
method of labeling the vertices
becomes necessary. One way to
do this is to create a coloring
algorithm.