Jun Gao, Number of (k-1)-cliques in k-critical graph

We prove that for $n>k\ge 3$, if $G$ is an $n$-vertex graph with chromatic number $k$ but any its proper subgraph has smaller chromatic number, then $G$ contains at most $n-k+3$ copies of cliques of size $k-1$. This answers a problem of Abbott and Zhou and provides a tight bound on a conjecture of Gallai.

This is joint work with Jie Ma.