Professor of Mathematics Debra Boutin recently published a research article titled "More Results on r-inflated Graphs: Arboricity, Thickness, Chromatic Number, and Fractional Chromatic Number" in Ars Mathematica Contemporanea.

In this paper, Boutin and her co-authors Michael Albertson (late of Smith College) and Ellen Gethner (University of Colorado, Denver) extend previous work on networks that are inflated by replacing each vertex in by a set of r mutually connected vertices and replacing each edge between a pair of vertices with all edges between the associated 2r vertices. In this second paper, they focus on creating tools and giving results for the thickness and chromatic number of r-inflations of graphs in various well-known graph families.