Hardness of approximating chromatic number of triangle-free graphs
They can be 3-colored in polynomial time, no? I didn't check the literature but here is a simple approach: take a DFS tree of the graph and color a node $u$ at depth $d(u)$ with color $(d(u)\mod 3)$. This gives a proper coloring since (1) the neighborhood of each vertex is an independent and (2) two nodes $u,v$ such that $|d(u)-d(v)| \geq 2$ cannot be adjacent.