The fractional chromatic number of the plane (Q722307)

A proper coloring of the plane assigns to each of its points a color such that points at distance 1 get distinct colors. The smallest number of colors that allows such a coloring is the chromatic number of the plane. The upper bound of this chromatic number is known to be 7. In fact, it can be shown that this number is bounded between 4 and 7. The notion of fractional chromatic number was introduced in the early 1970s in support of the Four Color Conjecture. In a fractional coloring of a graph, each independent set in the graph is assigned a nonnegative weight, such that each vertex appears in independent sets with weights summing to at least 1. The fractional chromatic number is the minimum sum of weights on the independent sets that allows such a coloring. This definition comes from solving the linear relaxation of the integer programming formulation of chromatic number. This paper investigates the fractional chromatic number of the plane. The previous best bounds for this number were between 3.5556 and 4.3599. The present paper improves the lower bound to 76/21 = 3.6190.