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An improvement of Hind’s upper bound on the total chromatic number. (English) Zbl 0862.05039
In [H. R. Hind, An upper bound for the total chromatic number, Graphs Comb. 6, No. 2, 153-159 (1990; Zbl 0725.05043)] it was shown that the total chromatic number of a simple $$k$$-chromatic graph exceeds the chromatic index by at most $$2k^{1/2}$$. In the paper under review, the upper bound for the difference is improved to $$18 k^{1/3} (\log (3k))^{1/2}$$. The proof uses a series of lemmas about partitioning the vertices of a graph so that the degree within each part is close to its expected value; these lemmas are proved using probabilistic arguments.

##### MSC:
 05C15 Coloring of graphs and hypergraphs
##### Keywords:
total chromatic number; chromatic index; upper bound
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##### References:
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