The rainbow connection number of 2-connected graphs

Abstract

The rainbow connection number of a graph G is the least number of colours in a (not necessarily proper) edge-colouring of G such that every two vertices are joined by a path which contains no colour twice. Improving a result of Caro et al., we prove that the rainbow connection number of every 2-connected graph with n vertices is at most the ceiling of n/2. The bound is optimal.