The Harmonious Chromatic Number of Bounded Degree Trees

A harmonious colouring of a simple graph G is a proper vertex colouring such that each pair of colours appears together on at most one edge. The harmonious chromatic number h(G) is the least number of colours in such a colouring. Let d be a fixed positive integer. We show that there is a natural number N ( d ) such that if T is any tree with m ≥ N ( d ) edges and maximum degree at most d , then the harmonious chromatic number h ( T ) is k or k + 1, where k is the least positive integer such that . We also give a polynomial time algorithm for determining the harmonious chromatic number of a tree with maximum degree at most d .