Albertson's Conjecture for Chromatic Numbers at Most 29

Abstract

Albertson's conjecture asserts that every finite simple graph $G$ with $\chi(G) \ge r$ satisfies $\operatorname{cr}(G) \ge \operatorname{cr}(K_r)$. Building on Cranston's verification for $r \le 24$ and his reduction of $r \in \{25,26\}$ to three residual orders, we eliminate those residual cases and then prove the cases $r=27,28,29$. The first structural ingredient is a Kempe-chain construction: if a $k$-critical graph has a vertex of degree $k-1$, then it contains a branch-clean essential immersion of $K_k$. Essential immersions are crossing-monotone, so a critical counterexample must have minimum degree at least $k$. For $r=27$, this one-unit degree gain, Gallai's join structure, critical-graph edge bounds, and induced-subgraph averaging close every possible order. For $r=28$ and $r=29$, the remaining near-$2r$ orders are converted to dense complements. Stehl\'ik's coloring theorem makes the odd-order complements factor-critical; a clique-partition obstruction yields an anti-tight matching property; and Tutte barriers, Hall-type expansion, and deficit bookkeeping eliminate the final cases. At order 58 for $r=29$, Rabern's coloring inequality handles the regular case, while the last degree-deficit-two case is reduced to two disjoint triangles and a finite barrier analysis.