Five-List-Coloring Graphs on Surfaces: The Many Faces Far-Apart Generalization of Thomassen's Theorem

Abstract

Let $G$ be a plane graph with $C$ the boundary of the outer face and let $(L(v):v\in V(G))$ be a family of non-empty sets. By an $L$-coloring of a subgraph $J$ of $G$ we mean a (proper) coloring $\phi$ of $J$ such that $\phi(v)\in L(v)$ for every vertex $v$ of $J$. Thomassen proved that if $v_1,v_2\in V(C)$ are adjacent, $L(v_1)\ne L(v_2)$, $|L(v)|\ge3$ for every $v\in V(C)\setminus \{v_1,v_2\}$ and $|L(v)|\ge5$ for every $v\in V(G)\setminus V(C)$, then $G$ has an $L$-coloring. As one final application in this last part of our series on $5$-list-coloring, we derive from all of our theory a far-reaching generalization of Thomassen's theorem, namely the generalization of Thomassen's theorem to arbitrarily many such faces provided that the faces are pairwise distance $D$ apart for some universal constant $D>0$.