Colorful Borsuk--Ulam theorems and applications

We prove a colorful generalization of the Borsuk--Ulam theorem and derive colorful consequences from it, such as a colorful generalization of the ham sandwich theorem. Even in the uncolored case this specializes to a strengthening of the ham sandwich theorem, which given an additional condition, contains a result of B\'{a}r\'{a}ny, Hubard, and Jer\'{o}nimo on well-separated measures as a special case. We prove a colorful generalization of Fan's antipodal sphere covering theorem, we derive a short proof of Gale's colorful KKM theorem, and we prove a colorful generalization of Brouwer's fixed point theorem. Our results also provide an alternative between Radon-type intersection results and KKM-type covering results. Finally, we prove colorful Borsuk--Ulam theorems for higher symmetry.Comment: 15 page

Topological methods in zero-sum Ramsey theory

A cornerstone result of Erd\H os, Ginzburg, and Ziv (EGZ) states that any sequence of $2n-1$ elements in $\mathbb{Z}/n$ contains a zero-sum subsequence of length $n$. While algebraic techniques have predominated in deriving many deep generalizations of this theorem over the past sixty years, here we introduce topological approaches to zero-sum problems which have proven fruitful in other combinatorial contexts. Our main result (1) is a topological criterion for determining when any $\mathbb{Z}/n$-coloring of an $n$-uniform hypergraph contains a zero-sum hyperedge. In addition to applications for Kneser hypergraphs, for complete hypergraphs our methods recover Olson's generalization of the EGZ theorem for arbitrary finite groups. Furthermore, we (2) give a fractional generalization of the EGZ theorem with applications to balanced set families and (3) provide a constrained EGZ theorem which imposes combinatorial restrictions on zero-sum sequences in the original result.Comment: 18 page