Additive colorings of planar graphs

Tomasz Bartnicki, Bartłomiej Bosek, Sebastian Czerwiński, Jarosław Grytczuk, Grzegorz Matecki, Wiktor Żelazny

Published 2012-02-03, updated 2012-02-06Version 2

An \emph{additive coloring} of a graph $G$ is an assignment of positive integers $\{1,2,...,k\}$ to the vertices of $G$ such that for every two adjacent vertices the sums of numbers assigned to their neighbors are different. The minimum number $k$ for which there exists an additive coloring of $G$ is denoted by $\eta (G)$. We prove that $\eta (G)\leqslant 468$ for every planar graph $G$. This improves a previous bound $\eta (G)\leqslant 5544$ due to Norin. The proof uses Combinatorial Nullstellensatz and coloring number of planar hypergrahs. We also demonstrate that $\eta (G)\leqslant 36$ for 3-colorable planar graphs, and $\eta (G)\leqslant 4$ for every planar graph of girth at least 13. In a group theoretic version of the problem we show that for each $r\geqslant 2$ there is an $r$-chromatic graph $G_{r}$ with no additive coloring by elements of any Abelian group of order $r$.