
Let be a positive integer. We say that a graph
is strongly
-colorable if for every partition of the vertices to sets of size at most
there is a proper
-coloring of
in which the vertices in each set of the partition have distinct colors.
Conjecture If
is the maximal degree of a graph
, then
is strongly
-colorable.




Haxell proved that if is the maximal degree of a graph
, then
is strongly
-colorable. She later proved that the strong chromatic number
is at most
for sufficiently large
depending on
. Aharoni, Berger, and Ziv proved the fractional relaxation.