In
graph theory
In mathematics, graph theory is the study of ''graphs'', which are mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects. A graph in this context is made up of '' vertices'' (also called ''nodes'' or ''points'') which are conne ...
, a b-coloring of a
graph
Graph may refer to:
Mathematics
*Graph (discrete mathematics), a structure made of vertices and edges
**Graph theory, the study of such graphs and their properties
*Graph (topology), a topological space resembling a graph in the sense of discre ...
is a
coloring of the vertices where each color class contains a vertex that has a neighbor in all other color classes.
The b-chromatic number of a ''G'' graph is the largest b(G) positive integer that the ''G'' graph has a b-coloring with b(G) number of colors.
Victor Campos, Carlos Lima és Ana Silva
[V. Campos, C. Lima, A. Silva: "b-coloring graphs with girth at least 8." The Seventh European Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory and Applications. Scuola Normale Superiore (2013).] used the relation between b-coloring and a graph's smallest
cycle to partly prove the
Erdős–Faber–Lovász conjecture
In graph theory, the Erdős–Faber–Lovász conjecture is a problem about graph coloring, named after Paul Erdős, Vance Faber, and László Lovász, who formulated it in 1972.. It says:
:If complete graphs, each having exactly vertices, have ...
.
References
Graph coloring