Bounds for the chromatic number and for some related parameters of a graph are obtained by applying algebraic techniques. In particular, the following result is proved: If G is a directed graph with maximum outdegree d, and if the number of Eulerian subgraphs of G with an even number of edges differs from the number of Eulerian subgraphs with an odd number of edges then for any assignment of a set S(v) of d + 1 colors for each vertex v of G there is a legal vertex-coloring of G assigning to each vertex v a color from S(v).
The concepts of (k, d)-coloring and the star chromatic number, studied by Vince, by Bondy and Hell, and by Zhu are shown to reflect the cographic instance of a wider concept, that of fractional nowhere-zero flows in regular matroids.
An H-decomposition of a graph G = (V, E) is a partition of E into subgraphs isomorphic to H. Given a fixed graph H, the H-decomposition problem is to determine whether an input graph G admits an H-decomposition. In 1980, Holyer conjectured that H-decomposition is NP-complete whenever H is connected and has three edges or more. Some partial results have been obtained since then. A complete proof of Holyer's conjecture is the content of this paper. The characterization problem of all graphs H for which H-decomposition is NP-complete is hence reduced to graphs where every connected component contains at most two edges.
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