Approximating the Orthogonality Dimension of Graphs and Hypergraphs

A t-dimensional orthogonal representation of a hypergraph is an assignment of nonzero vectors in R^t to its vertices, such that every hyperedge contains two vertices whose vectors are orthogonal. The orthogonality dimension of a hypergraph H, denoted by overline{xi}(H), is the smallest integer t for which there exists a t-dimensional orthogonal representation of H. In this paper we study computational aspects of the orthogonality dimension of graphs and hypergraphs. We prove that for every k >= 4, it is NP-hard (resp. quasi-NP-hard) to distinguish n-vertex k-uniform hypergraphs H with overline{xi}(H) = Omega(log^delta n) for some constant delta>0 (resp. overline{xi}(H) >= Omega(log^{1-o(1)} n)). For graphs, we relate the NP-hardness of approximating the orthogonality dimension to a variant of a long-standing conjecture of Stahl. We also consider the algorithmic problem in which given a graph G with overline{xi}(G) <= 3 the goal is to find an orthogonal representation of G of as low dimension as possible, and provide a polynomial time approximation algorithm based on semidefinite programming

A generalization of Gale's lemma

In this work, we present a generalization of Gale's lemma. Using this generalization, we introduce two combinatorial sharp lower bounds for ${\rm conid}({\rm B}_0(G))+1$ and ${\rm conid}({\rm B}(G))+2$, two famous topological lower bounds for the chromatic number of a graph $G$