A note on intersecting hypergraphs with large cover number

Published by 'The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics' at 10.37236/6460.We give a construction of r-partite r-uniform intersecting hypergraphs with cover number at least r−4 for all but finitely many r. This answers a question of Abu-Khazneh, Barát, Pokrovskiy and Szabó, and shows that a long-standing unsolved conjecture due to Ryser is close to being best possible for every value of r.Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canad

Non-intersecting Ryser hypergraphs

A famous conjecture of Ryser states that every $r$-partite hypergraph has vertex cover number at most $r - 1$ times the matching number. In recent years, hypergraphs meeting this conjectured bound, known as $r$-Ryser hypergraphs, have been studied extensively. It was recently proved by Haxell, Narins and Szab\'{o} that all $3$-Ryser hypergraphs with matching number $\nu > 1$ are essentially obtained by taking $\nu$ disjoint copies of intersecting $3$-Ryser hypergraphs. Abu-Khazneh showed that such a characterisation is false for $r = 4$ by giving a computer generated example of a $4$-Ryser hypergraph with $\nu = 2$ whose vertex set cannot be partitioned into two sets such that we have an intersecting $4$-Ryser hypergraph on each of these parts. Here we construct new infinite families of $r$-Ryser hypergraphs, for any given matching number $\nu > 1$, that do not contain two vertex disjoint intersecting $r$-Ryser subhypergraphs.Comment: 8 pages, some corrections in the proof of Lemma 3.6, added more explanation in the appendix, and other minor change

A family of extremal hypergraphs for Ryser's conjecture

Ryser's Conjecture states that for any $r$-partite $r$-uniform hypergraph, the vertex cover number is at most $r{-}1$ times the matching number. This conjecture is only known to be true for $r\leq 3$ in general and for $r\leq 5$ if the hypergraph is intersecting. There has also been considerable effort made for finding hypergraphs that are extremal for Ryser's Conjecture, i.e. $r$-partite hypergraphs whose cover number is $r-1$ times its matching number. Aside from a few sporadic examples, the set of uniformities $r$ for which Ryser's Conjecture is known to be tight is limited to those integers for which a projective plane of order $r-1$ exists. We produce a new infinite family of $r$-uniform hypergraphs extremal to Ryser's Conjecture, which exists whenever a projective plane of order $r-2$ exists. Our construction is flexible enough to produce a large number of non-isomorphic extremal hypergraphs. In particular, we define what we call the {\em Ryser poset} of extremal intersecting $r$-partite $r$-uniform hypergraphs and show that the number of maximal and minimal elements is exponential in $\sqrt{r}$. This provides further evidence for the difficulty of Ryser's Conjecture

Covering graphs by monochromatic trees and Helly-type results for hypergraphs

How many monochromatic paths, cycles or general trees does one need to cover all vertices of a given $r$-edge-coloured graph $G$? These problems were introduced in the 1960s and were intensively studied by various researchers over the last 50 years. In this paper, we establish a connection between this problem and the following natural Helly-type question in hypergraphs. Roughly speaking, this question asks for the maximum number of vertices needed to cover all the edges of a hypergraph $H$ if it is known that any collection of a few edges of $H$ has a small cover. We obtain quite accurate bounds for the hypergraph problem and use them to give some unexpected answers to several questions about covering graphs by monochromatic trees raised and studied by Bal and DeBiasio, Kohayakawa, Mota and Schacht, Lang and Lo, and Gir\~ao, Letzter and Sahasrabudhe.Comment: 20 pages including references plus 2 pages of an Appendi

A family of extremal hypergraphs for Ryser's conjecture

Ryser's Conjecture states that for any r-partite r-uniform hypergraph, the vertex cover number is at most r−1 times the matching number. This conjecture is only known to be true for r≤3 in general and for r≤5 if the hypergraph is intersecting. There has also been considerable effort made for finding hypergraphs that are extremal for Ryser's Conjecture, i.e. r-partite hypergraphs whose cover number is r−1 times its matching number. Aside from a few sporadic examples, the set of uniformities r for which Ryser's Conjecture is known to be tight is limited to those integers for which a projective plane of order r−1 exists. We produce a new infinite family of r-uniform hypergraphs extremal to Ryser's Conjecture, which exists whenever a projective plane of order r−2 exists. Our construction is flexible enough to produce a large number of non-isomorphic extremal hypergraphs. In particular, we define what we call the Ryser poset of extremal intersecting r-partite r-uniform hypergraphs and show that the number of maximal and minimal elements is exponential in r. This provides further evidence for the difficulty of Ryser's Conjecture

A note on intersecting hypergraphs with large cover number

We give a construction of r-partite r-uniform intersecting hypergraphs with cover number at least r − 4 for all but finitely many r. This answers a question of Abu-Khazneh, Barát, Pokrovskiy and Szabó, and shows that a long-standing unsolved conjecture due to Ryser is close to being best possible for every value of r

A note on intersecting hypergraphs with large cover number

We give a construction of r-partite r-uniform intersecting hypergraphs with cover number at least r − 4 for all but finitely many r. This answers a question of Abu-Khazneh, Barát, Pokrovskiy and Szabó, and shows that a long-standing unsolved conjecture due to Ryser is close to being best possible for every value of r