coloring stronghstrong-free hypergraphs - homepages.math.uic.edu.pdfVIP

Coloring H-free hypergraphs ∗ † ‡ Tom Bohman, Alan Frieze, Dhruv Mubayi April 10, 2009 Abstract Fix r ≥ 2 and a collection of r-uniform hypergraphs H. What is the minimum number of edges in an H-free r-uniform hypergraph with chromatic number greater than k? We investigate this question for various H. Our results include the following: • An (r, l)-system is an r-uniform hypergraph with every two edges sharing at most l vertices. For k sufficiently large, there is an (r, l)-system with chromatic number greater than k and number of edges at most c(kr −1 log k)l/(l−1) , where 100(r)2 1/(l−1) 10(r − 1)l/(l−1) c = 2 l . l! l − 1 This improves on the previous best bounds of Kostochka-Mubayi-R¨odl-Tetali [10]. The upper bound is sharp apart from the constant c as shown in [10]. • The minimum number of edges in an r-uniform hypergraph with independent neigh- borhoods and chromatic number greater than k is of order kr+1/(r −1) logO(1) k as k → ∞. This generalizes (aside from logarithmic factors) a result of Gimbel and Thomassen [6] for triangle-free graphs. • Let T be an r-uniform hypertree of t edges. Then every T -free r-uniform hypergraph has chromatic number at most 2(r − 1)(t − 1) + 1. This generalizes the well known fact that every T -free graph has chromatic number at most t. Several open problems and conjectures are also posed. ∗Departmen