Reed's chromatic bound conjecture

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Let GG be a graph, with maximum degree Δ(G)\Delta(G) and clique number ω(G)\omega(G). Reed's conjecture. Every graph GG satisfies

χ(G)≤⌈12(Δ(G)+1+ω(G))⌉.\chi(G) \leq \left\lceil \frac{1}{2}(\Delta(G)+1+\omega(G))\right\rceil.

This refines the Borodin–Kostochka direction and is equivalent to a stronger interpolation between maximum degree and clique number. It remains open, although partial results establish related bounds with a smaller coefficient than the conjectured one.

References

Primary source

Ken-ichi Kawarabayashi and Lucas Picasarri-Arrieta, “Coloring digraphs with Δ-b colors”, arXiv:2607.06928 (2026).

Additional references

11 papers in this index state this conjecture (2009–2026). The statement above is taken from the most recent of them; the others are arXiv:2507.10266, arXiv:1810.06704, arXiv:1803.01051, arXiv:1611.02063, arXiv:1404.6550, arXiv:1212.3036, arXiv:1211.1410, arXiv:1110.4896, arXiv:0907.1583, arXiv:0907.3705.

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