Large Induced Forests in Triangle-Free Planar Graphs

Abstract

Given a planar graph G, what is the largest subset of vertices of G that induces a forest? Albertson and Berman [2] conjectured that every planar graph has an induced subgraph on at least half of the vertices that is a forest. For bipartite planar graphs, Akiyama and Wanatabe [1] conjectured that there is always an induced forest of size at least 5n/8. Here we prove that every triangle-free (and therefore every bipartite) planar graph on n vertices has an induced forest of size at least (17n+24)/32.