The de Bruijn-Erdős Theorem for Hypergraphs

Abstract Fix integers n ≥ r ≥ 2. A clique partition of is a collection of proper subsets is a partition of . Let cp(n, r) denote the minimum size of a clique partition of . A classical theorem of de Bruijn and Erdős states that cp(n, 2) = n. In this paper we study cp(n, r), and show in general that for each fixed r ≥ 3, We conjecture cp(n, r) = (1 + o(1))n r/2 . This conjecture has already been verified (in a very strong sense) for r = 3 by Hartman-Mullin-Stinson. We give further evidence of this conjecture by constructing, for each r ≥ 4, a family of (1 + o(1))n r/2 subsets of [n] with the following property: no two r-sets of [n] are covered more than once and all but o(n r ) of the r-sets of [n] are covered. We also give an absolute lower bound cp(n, r) when n = q 2 + q + r − 1, and for each r characterize the finitely many configurations achieving equality with the lower bound. Finally we note the connection of cp(n, r) to extremal graph theory, and determine some new asymptotically sharp bounds for the Zarankiewicz problem

Some remarks on the Zarankiewicz problem

The Zarankiewicz problem asks for an estimate on z(m,n;s,t), the largest number of 1's in an m×n matrix with all entries 0 or 1 containing no s×t submatrix consisting entirely of 1's. We show that a classical upper bound for z(m,n;s,t) due to Kővári, Sós and Turán is tight up to the constant for a broad range of parameters. The proof relies on a new quantitative variant of the random algebraic method