On March 3, 2026, Chính T. Hoàng from the Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada gave a survey talk on graph coloring and forbidden induced subgraphs at the Discrete Math Seminar. The title of his talk was “Problems on graph coloring“.
Chính T. Hoàng, Problems on graph coloring
A k-coloring of a graph is an assignment of k colors to its vertices such that no two adjacent adjacent vertices receive the same color. The Coloring Problem is the problem of determining the smallest k such that the graph admits a k-coloring. Given a set L of graphs, a graph G is L-free if G does not contain any graph in L as an induced subgraph. The complexity of the Coloring Problem for L-free graphs is known (NP-complete or polynomial-time solvable) whenever L contains a single graph. There has been keen interest in coloring graphs whose forbidden list L contains basic graphs such as induced paths, induced cycles and their complements. In this talk, I will provide a survey of recent progress on this topic.


