AbstractAs a strengthening of Hadwiger’s conjecture, Gerards and Seymour conjectured that every graph with no oddKtminor is (t− 1)-colourable. We prove two weaker variants of this conjecture. Firstly, we show that for eacht⩾ 2, every graph with no oddKtminor has a partition of its vertex set into 6t− 9 setsV1, …,V6t−9such that eachViinduces a subgraph of bounded maximum degree. Secondly, we prove that for eacht⩾ 2, every graph with no odd Kt minor has a partition of its vertex set into 10t−13 setsV1,…,V10t−13such that eachViinduces a subgraph with components of bounded size. The second theorem improves a result of Kawarabayashi (2008), which states that the vertex set can be partitioned into 496tsuch sets.
Hadwiger's conjecture for degree sequences
