Speaker: Evelyne Smith-Roberge (Georgia Tech)
Title: Acyclic List Colouring Locally Planar Graphs
Abstract: We say a vertex colouring is acyclic if every cycle in the graph uses at least three colours. In 1979, Borodin proved that planar graphs are acyclically 5-colourable. In 2010, Kawarabayashi and Mohar proved that locally planar graphs are acyclically 7-colourable. In 2002, Borodin, Fon-Der-Flaass, Kostochka, Raspaud, and Sopena proved that planar graphs are acyclically 7-list-colourable. Recently, Luke Postle, Massimo Vicenzo and I proved that locally planar graphs are acyclically 9-list-colourable; to the best of our knowledge, no bound for acyclic list colouring locally planar graphs was previously known. I will give some history of the problem, and discuss the main ideas behind our proof.