MH 1301 Discrete Mathematics

Assignment 09 Questions

Question 1
1. Suppose that a connected planar graph has eight vertices, each of degree three.
Into how many regions is the plane divided by a planar representation of this
graph ?

2. Suppose that a connected planar simple graph with m edges and n vertices
contains no simple circuits of length 4 or less. Show that m ≤ (5/3)n − (10/3)
if n ≥ 4.

Question 2
1. Prove that K2,5 is planar by drawing the graph without edges that cross each
other. What about K2,n ?

2. Prove that removing one edge from K3,3 leads to a planar graph. How about
K5 ?

3. Prove that there is no 6-regular simple graph that is planar. (Hint: How many
edges does a 6-regular graph have?)

Question 3

The n-dimensional hypercube Qn is a graph whose vertices are the 2n strings of length
n over the alphabet {0, 1}, and for which two vertices are connected if and only if
the associated strings differ in exactly one position. Note that Qn has 2n vertices
and n/2 · 2n edges (the degree of all vertices is n).

The hypercubes Q1 , Q2 , Q3 , Q4 1 look like this:

1
Q2 is a square, Q3 a cube, and Q4 is called a tesseract.

1
Determine the chromatic number of Qn for all n.

Question 4
1. Find a planar graph G such that χ(G) = 4.

2. Prove that if, for a graph G, we remove one vertex and the edges incident to
it, then the resulting graph G0 has chromatic number either χ(G) or χ(G) − 1.

3. [hard] Is there a planar simple connected graph with more than 3 vertices,
such that removing any vertex and incident edges from it results in χ(G) − 1
? If so, find one.

4. [hard] Is there a planar simple connected graph with 5 or less vertices, such
that removing any vertex and incident edges from it results in χ(G) ? If so,
find one.

Question 5

Show that if G is a simple graph with at least 11 vertices, then either G or G, the
complement of G, is nonplanar.