Acyclic and star colorings of cographs

Abstract

An acyclic coloring of a graph is a proper vertex coloring such that the union of any two color classes induces a disjoint collection of trees. The more restricted notion of star coloring requires that the union of any two color classes induces a disjoint collection of stars. We prove that every acyclic coloring of a cograph is also a star coloring and give a linear-time algorithm for finding an optimal acyclic and star coloring of a cograph. If the graph is given in the form of a cotree, the algorithm runs in O ( n ) time. We also show that the acyclic chromatic number, the star chromatic number, the treewidth plus 1, and the pathwidth plus 1 are all equal for cographs.