Equitable versus nearly equitable coloring and the Chen-Lih-Wu Conjecture (Q555496)

A proper vertex colouring of a graph is called equitable if the colour classes differ in size by at most one. The authors extend the conjecture of \textit{B.-L. Chen}, \textit{K.-W. Lih}, and \textit{P.-L. Wu} [Eur. J. Comb. 15, No. ~5, 443--447 (1994; Zbl 0809.05050)] to disconnected graphs. The new conjecture says that if an \(r\)-colourable graph \(G\) with maximum degree \(r\), \(r \geq 6\) is not equitably \(r\)-colourable then \(r\) is odd, \(G\) contains \(K_{r,r}\) and \(V(G)\) can be partitioned into subsets \(V_0,\dots,V_t\) such that \(G[V_0] =K_{r,r}\) and for each \(i=1,2,\dots,t\), \(G[V_i] = K_r\). It is proved that these two conjectures are equivalent.