OFFSET
1,1
COMMENTS
The 2-tone chromatic number of a graph G is the smallest number of colors for which G has a coloring where every vertex has two distinct colors, no adjacent vertices have a common color, and no pair of vertices at distance 2 have two common colors.
The graphs are formed by replacing each edge of K_3 by n disjoint paths with length 2, resulting in 3n+3 vertices. These graphs have large 2-tone chromatic number relative to their maximum degree of 2t.
LINKS
Allan Bickle, 2-Tone coloring of joins and products of graphs, Congr. Numer. 217 (2013) 171-190.
Allan Bickle, 2-Tone Coloring of Planar Graphs, Bull. Inst. Combin. Appl. 103 (2025) 114-129.
Allan Bickle and B. Phillips, t-Tone Colorings of Graphs, Utilitas Math, 106 (2018) 85-102.
D. W. Cranston and H. LaFayette, The t-tone chromatic number of classes of sparse graphs, Australas. J. Combin. 86 (2023) 458-476.
FORMULA
a(n) = ceiling(1.5 + sqrt(6*n + 6.25)) for n < 18.
a(n) = ceiling(0.5 + sqrt(6*n + 24.25)) for n > 6.
EXAMPLE
For n=1, the graph is a 6-cycle, which has a 2-tone 5-coloring -12-34-15-32-14-35-. Thus a(1) = 5.
CROSSREFS
KEYWORD
nonn,new
AUTHOR
Allan Bickle, Feb 27 2025
STATUS
approved