Generalisation : graphs and colourings

The interaction between practice and theory in mathematics is a central theme. Many mathematical structures and theories result from the formalisation of a real problem. Graph Theory is rich with such examples. The graph structure itself was formalised by Leonard Euler in the quest to solve the problem of the Bridges of Königsberg. Once a structure is formalised, and results are proven, the mathematician seeks to generalise. This can be considered as one of the main praxis in mathematics. The idea of generalisation will be illustrated through graph colouring. This idea also results from a classic problem, in which it was well known by topographers that four colours suffice to colour any map such that no countries sharing a border receive the same colour. The proof of this theorem eluded mathematicians for centuries and was proven in 1976. Generalisation of graphs to hypergraphs, and variations on the colouring theme will be discussed, as well as applications in other disciplines.peer-reviewe

The uniform face ideals of a simplicial complex

We define the uniform face ideal of a simplicial complex with respect to an ordered proper vertex colouring of the complex. This ideal is a monomial ideal which is generally not squarefree. We show that such a monomial ideal has a linear resolution, as do all of its powers, if and only if the colouring satisfies a certain nesting property. In the case when the colouring is nested, we give a minimal cellular resolution supported on a cubical complex. From this, we give the graded Betti numbers in terms of the face-vector of the underlying simplicial complex. Moreover, we explicitly describe the Boij-S\"oderberg decompositions of both the ideal and its quotient. We also give explicit formul\ae\ for the codimension, Krull dimension, multiplicity, projective dimension, depth, and regularity. Further still, we describe the associated primes, and we show that they are persistent.Comment: 34 pages, 8 figure

Erdos-Hajnal-type theorems in hypergraphs

The Erdos-Hajnal conjecture states that if a graph on n vertices is H-free, that is, it does not contain an induced copy of a given graph H, then it must contain either a clique or an independent set of size n^{d(H)}, where d(H) > 0 depends only on the graph H. Except for a few special cases, this conjecture remains wide open. However, it is known that a H-free graph must contain a complete or empty bipartite graph with parts of polynomial size. We prove an analogue of this result for 3-uniform hypergraphs, showing that if a 3-uniform hypergraph on n vertices is H-free, for any given H, then it must contain a complete or empty tripartite subgraph with parts of order c(log n)^{1/2 + d(H)}, where d(H) > 0 depends only on H. This improves on the bound of c(log n)^{1/2}, which holds in all 3-uniform hypergraphs, and, up to the value of the constant d(H), is best possible. We also prove that, for k > 3, no analogue of the standard Erdos-Hajnal conjecture can hold in k-uniform hypergraphs. That is, there are k-uniform hypergraphs H and sequences of H-free hypergraphs which do not contain cliques or independent sets of size appreciably larger than one would normally expect.Comment: 15 page