Randomly colouring graphs (a combinatorial view)

Abstract

International audienceThe application of the probabilistic method to graph colouring has been yielding interesting results for more than 40 years. Several probabilistic tools are presented in this survey, ranging from the basic to the more advanced. For each of them, an application to a graph colouring problem is presented in detail. In this way, not only is the general idea of the method exposed, but also are the concrete details arising with its application. Further, this allows us to introduce some important variants of the usual graph colouring notion (with some related open questions), and at the same time to illustrate the variety of the probabilistic techniques. The survey tries to be self-contained