Vertex covers by monochromatic pieces - A survey of results and problems

This survey is devoted to problems and results concerning covering the vertices of edge colored graphs or hypergraphs with monochromatic paths, cycles and other objects. It is an expanded version of the talk with the same title at the Seventh Cracow Conference on Graph Theory, held in Rytro in September 14-19, 2014.Comment: Discrete Mathematics, 201

Hipergráfok = Hypergraphs

A projekt célkitűzéseit sikerült megvalósítani. A négy év során több mint száz kiváló eredmény született, amiből eddig 84 dolgozat jelent meg a téma legkiválóbb folyóirataiban, mint Combinatorica, Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Journal of Graph Theory, Random Graphs and Structures, stb. Számos régóta fennálló sejtést bebizonyítottunk, egész régi nyitott problémát megoldottunk hipergráfokkal kapcsolatban illetve kapcsolódó területeken. A problémák némelyike sok éve, olykor több évtizede nyitott volt. Nem egy közvetlen kutatási eredmény, de szintén bizonyos értékmérő, hogy a résztvevők egyike a Norvég Királyi Akadémia tagja lett és elnyerte a Steele díjat. | We managed to reach the goals of the project. We achieved more than one hundred excellent results, 84 of them appeared already in the most prestigious journals of the subject, like Combinatorica, Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Journal of Graph Theory, Random Graphs and Structures, etc. We proved several long standing conjectures, solved quite old open problems in the area of hypergraphs and related subjects. Some of the problems were open for many years, sometimes for decades. It is not a direct research result but kind of an evaluation too that a member of the team became a member of the Norvegian Royal Academy and won Steele Prize

K3K_3-WORM colorings of graphs: Lower chromatic number and gaps in the chromatic spectrum

A $K_3$-WORM coloring of a graph $G$ is an assignment of colors to the vertices in such a way that the vertices of each $K_3$-subgraph of $G$ get precisely two colors. We study graphs $G$ which admit at least one such coloring. We disprove a conjecture of Goddard et al. [Congr. Numer., 219 (2014) 161--173] who asked whether every such graph has a $K_3$-WORM coloring with two colors. In fact for every integer $k\ge 3$ there exists a $K_3$-WORM colorable graph in which the minimum number of colors is exactly $k$. There also exist $K_3$-WORM colorable graphs which have a $K_3$-WORM coloring with two colors and also with $k$ colors but no coloring with any of $3,\dots,k-1$ colors. We also prove that it is NP-hard to determine the minimum number of colors and NP-complete to decide $k$-colorability for every $k \ge 2$ (and remains intractable even for graphs of maximum degree 9 if $k=3$). On the other hand, we prove positive results for $d$-degenerate graphs with small $d$, also including planar graphs. Moreover we point out a fundamental connection with the theory of the colorings of mixed hypergraphs. We list many open problems at the end.Comment: 18 page

Toric algebra of hypergraphs

The edges of any hypergraph parametrize a monomial algebra called the edge subring of the hypergraph. We study presentation ideals of these edge subrings, and describe their generators in terms of balanced walks on hypergraphs. Our results generalize those for the defining ideals of edge subrings of graphs, which are well-known in the commutative algebra community, and popular in the algebraic statistics community. One of the motivations for studying toric ideals of hypergraphs comes from algebraic statistics, where generators of the toric ideal give a basis for random walks on fibers of the statistical model specified by the hypergraph. Further, understanding the structure of the generators gives insight into the model geometry.Comment: Section 3 is new: it explains connections to log-linear models in algebraic statistics and to combinatorial discrepancy. Section 6 (open problems) has been moderately revise