The Circular Chromatic Number of the Mycielskian d of Gk Lingling Huang and Gerard J. Chang∗ DEPARTMENT OF APPLIED MATHEMATICS NATIONAL CHIAO TUNG UNIVERSITY HSINCHU 30050, TAIWAN E-mail: llhuang,
[email protected] Received February 2, 1998; revised November 23, 1998 Abstract: In a search for triangle-free graphs with arbitrarily large chromatic numbers, Mycielski developed a graph transformation that transforms a graph G into a new graph µ(G), we now call the Mycielskian of G, which has the same clique number as G and whose chromatic number equals χ(G)+1. Chang, Huang, and Zhu [G. J. Chang, L. Huang, & X. Zhu, Discrete Math, to appear] have investi- gated circular chromatic numbers of Mycielskians for several classes of graphs. In this article, we study circular chromatic numbers of Mycielskians for another class d d d of graphs Gk. The main result is that χc(µ(Gk)) = χ(µ(Gk)), which settles a prob- lem raised in [G. J. Chang, L. Huang, & X. Zhu, Discrete Math, to appear, and X. Zhu, d k d k to appear]. As χc(Gk)= d and χ(Gk)=d d e, consequently, there exist graphs G such that χc(G) is as close to χ(G) − 1 as you want, but χc(µ(G)) = χ(µ(G)). c 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Graph Theory 32: 63–71, 1999 Keywords: chromatic number; circular chromatic number; color; Mycielskian; triangle; clique number 1. INTRODUCTION In a search for triangle-free graphs with arbitrarily large chromatic numbers, Mycielski [9] developed an interesting graph transformation as follows.