The intersection spectrum of 3-chromatic intersecting hypergraphs


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Date

2022-05

Publication Type

Journal Article

ETH Bibliography

yes

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Abstract

For a hypergraph H$H$, define its intersection spectrum I(H)$I(H)$ as the set of all intersection sizes |E boolean AND F|$|E\cap F|$ of distinct edges E,F is an element of E(H)$E,F\in E(H)$. In their seminal paper from 1973 which introduced the local lemma, Erdos and Lovasz asked: how large must the intersection spectrum of a k$k$-uniform 3-chromatic intersecting hypergraph be? They showed that such a hypergraph must have at least three intersection sizes, and conjectured that the size of the intersection spectrum tends to infinity with k$k$. Despite the problem being reiterated several times over the years by Erdos and other researchers, the lower bound of three intersection sizes has remarkably withstood any improvement until now. In this paper, we prove the Erdos-Lovasz conjecture in a strong form by showing that there are at least k1/2-o(1)$k<^>{1/2-o(1)}$ intersection sizes. Our proof consists of a delicate interplay between Ramsey-type arguments and a density increment approach.

Publication status

published

Editor

Book title

Volume

124 (5)

Pages / Article No.

680 - 690

Publisher

Wiley

Event

Edition / version

Methods

Software

Geographic location

Date collected

Date created

Subject

Organisational unit

03993 - Sudakov, Benjamin / Sudakov, Benjamin check_circle
02889 - ETH Institut für Theoretische Studien / ETH Institute for Theoretical Studies

Notes

Funding

196965 - Problems in Extremal and Probabilistic Combinatorics (SNF)

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