Triangulations and the Hajós Conjecture

Abstract

The Hajós Conjecture was disproved in 1979 by Catlin. Recently, Thomassen showed that there are many ways that Hajós conjecture can go wrong. On the other hand, he observed that locally planar graphs and triangulations of the projective plane and the torus satisfy Hajós Conjecture, and he conjectured that the same holds for arbitrary triangulations of closed surfaces. In this note we disprove the conjecture and show that there are different reasons why the Hajós Conjecture fails also for triangulations.