Odd Hadwiger's conjecture

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Let (G,−)(G,-) be the signed graph obtained from a graph GG by assigning a negative sign to every edge, and let (Kt,−)(K_t,-) be the all-negative signed complete graph. A signed graph minor is obtained by vertex deletion, edge deletion, contraction of positive edges, and switching at vertices. Odd Hadwiger's conjecture. If (G,−)(G,-) is (Kt,−)(K_t,-)-minor-free, then

χ(G)≤t−1.\chi(G)\leq t-1.

This is a strengthening of Hadwiger's conjecture introduced independently by Gerards and Seymour. The cases t=3t=3 and t=4t=4 are known, the case t=5t=5 implies the four-color theorem, and all remaining cases are open according to the source.

References

Primary source

Meirun Chen, Reza Naserasr, Lujia Wang and Sanming Zhou, “Odd Hadwiger's conjecture for the complements of Kneser graphs”, arXiv:2505.10097 (2025).

Additional references

8 papers in this index state this conjecture (2019–2025). The statement above is taken from the most recent of them; the others are arXiv:2505.07727, arXiv:2505.03851, arXiv:2312.17130, arXiv:2308.01242, arXiv:2109.02302, arXiv:2010.05999, arXiv:1910.09378.

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