The Erdős--Faber--Lovász Conjecture revisited

Abstract

The Erdős--Faber--Lovász Conjecture, posed in 1972, states that if a graph $G$ is the union of $n$ cliques of order $n$ (referred to as defining $n$-cliques) such that two cliques can share at most one vertex, then the vertices of $G$ can be properly coloured using $n$ colours. Although still open after almost 50 years, it can be easily shown that the conjecture is true when every shared vertex belongs to exactly two defining $n$-cliques. We here provide a quick and easy algorithm to colour the vertices of $G$ in this case, and discuss connections with clique-decompositions and edge-colourings of graphs.