Odd Hadwiger's conjecture

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)t1.\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.

Sources & referencesView supporting material

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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