Achromatic colorings of polarity graphs

A complete partition of a graph G is a partition of the vertex set such that there is at least one edge between any two parts. The largest r such that G has a complete partition into r parts, each of which is an independent set, is the achromatic number of G. We determine the achromatic number of polarity graphs of biaffine planes coming from generalized polygons. Our colorings of a family of unitary polarity graphs are used to solve a problem of Axenovich and Martin on complete partitions of C 4-free graphs. Furthermore, these colorings prove that there are sequences of graphs which are optimally complete and have unbounded degree, a problem that had been studied for the sequence of hypercubes independently by Roichman, and Ahlswede, Bezrukov, Blokhuis, Metsch, and Moorhouse. (c) 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights are reserved, including those for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies.