- Research Article
41
- 10.1145/2000807.2000809
Three-coloring triangle-free planar graphs in linear time
- Sep 01, 2011
- ACM Transactions on Algorithms
- Zdeněk Dvořák + 2 more +2
Grötzsch's theorem states that every triangle-free planar graph is 3-colorable, and several relatively simple proofs of this fact were provided by Thomassen and other authors. It is easy to convert these proofs into quadratic-time algorithms to find a 3-coloring, but it is not clear how to find such a coloring in linear time (Kowalik used a nontrivial data structure to construct anO(nlogn) algorithm).We design a linear-time algorithm to find a 3-coloring of a given triangle-free planar graph. The algorithm avoids using any complex data structures, which makes it easy to implement. As a by-product, we give a yet simpler proof of Grötzsch's theorem.
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