altermatic

English

Etymology

Coined by mathematicians Meysam Alishahiand and Hossein Hajiabolhassan in 2014 for the 2015 paper "On the chromatic number of general Kneser hypergraphs" as a blend of alternating +‎ chromatic on the grounds that the chromatic bound is given by a longest subsequence in which every pair of consecutive terms differs (loosely, the subsequence "alternates").

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˌɒl.təˈmæt.ɪk/, /ˌɔːl.tə-/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˌɔl.təɹˈmæt.ɪk/, /ˌɑl.təɹ-/
• Rhymes: -ætɪk

Adjective

altermatic (not comparable)

1. (mathematics) Describing a certain combinatorial lower bound of a chromatic number of a graph.
   • 2015, Meysam Alishahi, Hossein Hajiabolhassan, “On The Chromatic Number of Matching Graphs”, in arXiv‎^[1]:

     In this paper, as a generalization of the well-known result of Schrijver about the chromatic number of Schrijver graphs, we determine the chromatic number of a large family of matching graphs by specifying their altermatic number.