Related papers: Hodge theory in combinatorics

Combinatorics, in particular graph theory, has a rich history of being a domain of successful applications of tools from other areas of mathematics, including topological methods. Here, we survey the study of the Hom-complexes, and the ways…

The chromatic polynomial of a graph G counts the number of proper colorings of G. We give an affirmative answer to the conjecture of Read and Rota-Heron-Welsh that the absolute values of the coefficients of the chromatic polynomial form a…

The chromatic polynomial is a well studied object in graph theory. There are many results and conjectures about the log-concavity of the chromatic polynomial and other polynomials related to it. The location of the roots of these…

The chromatic polynomial and its generalization, the chromatic symmetric function, are two important graph invariants. Celebrated theorems of Birkhoff, Whitney, and Stanley show how both objects can be expressed in three different ways: as…

The chromatic polynomial of a graph is an important notion in algebraic combinatorics that was introduced by Birkhoff in 1912; denoted $P(G,k)$, it equals the number of proper $k$-colorings of graph $G$. Enumerative analogues of the…

We prove the hard Lefschetz theorem and the Hodge-Riemann relations for a commutative ring associated to an arbitrary matroid M. We use the Hodge-Riemann relations to resolve a conjecture of Heron, Rota, and Welsh that postulates the…

Let $G$ be a simple graph with maximum degree $\Delta(G)$. A subgraph $H$ of $G$ is overfull if $|E(H)|>\Delta(G)\lfloor |V(H)|/2 \rfloor$. Chetwynd and Hilton in 1985 conjectured that a graph $G$ with $\Delta(G)>|V(G)|/3$ has chromatic…

In a recent paper, the first author proved the log-concavity of the coefficients of the characteristic polynomial of a matroid realizable over a field of characteristic 0, answering a long-standing conjecture of Read in graph theory. We…

The chromatic polynomial $\pi_{G}(k)$ of a graph $G$ can be viewed as counting the number of vertices in a family of coloring graphs $\mathcal C_k(G)$ associated with (proper) $k$-colorings of $G$ as a function of the number of colors $k$.…

The Kneser conjecture (1955) was proved by Lov\'asz (1978) using the Borsuk-Ulam theorem; all subsequent proofs, extensions and generalizations also relied on Algebraic Topology results, namely the Borsuk-Ulam theorem and its extensions.…

We show that the chromatic index of a hypergraph $\mathcal{H}$ satisfies Berge-F\"uredi conjectured bound $\mathrm{q}(\mathcal{H})\le \Delta([\mathcal{H}]_2)+1$ under certain hypotheses on the antirank $\mathrm{ar}(\mathcal{H})$ or on the…

Let G be a combinatorial graph with vertices V and edges E. A proper coloring of G is an assignment of colors to the vertices such that no edge connects two vertices of the same color. These are the colorings considered in the famous Four…

Given a graph $G$, the $k$-coloring graph $\mathcal{C}_k(G)$ is constructed by selecting proper $k$-colorings of $G$ as vertices, with an edge between two colorings if they differ in the color of exactly one vertex. The number of vertices…

In a simple graph $G$, we prove that the \textit{Hadwiger number}, $h(G)$, of the given graph $G$ always upper bounds the \textit{chromatic number}, $\chi(G)$, of the given graph $G$, that is, $\chi(G) \leq h(G)$. This simply stated problem…

Ramsey's Theorem guarantees for every graph H that any 2-edge-coloring of a sufficiently large complete graph contains a monochromatic copy of H. In 1962, Erdos conjectured that the random 2-edge-coloring minimizes the number of…

The long-standing Erd\H{o}s-Faber-Lov\'asz conjecture states that every $n$-uniform linear hypergaph with $n$ edges has a proper vertex-coloring using $n$ colors. In this paper we propose an algebraic framework to the problem and formulate…

The bivariate chromatic polynomial $\chi_G(x,y)$ of a graph $G = (V, E)$, introduced by Dohmen-P\"{o}nitz-Tittmann (2003), counts all $x$-colorings of $G$ such that adjacent vertices get different colors if they are $\le y$. We extend this…

We find families of graphs $G$ and subgraphs $H$ of $G$ such that the number of edge colorings of $G$ avoiding a monochromatic coloring of $H$ is determined by lattice point counts or a Hodge structure on the cohomology of a certain toric…

In the way of proving Kneser's conjecture, L\'{a}szl\'{o} Lov\'{a}sz settled out a new lower bound for the chromatic number of graphs. He showed that if the hom complex $||Hom(\mathcal{K}_2, H)||$ of a graph $H$ is topologically…

The famous List Colouring Conjecture from the 1970s states that for every graph $G$ the chromatic index of $G$ is equal to its list chromatic index. In 1996 in a seminal paper, Kahn proved that the List Colouring Conjecture holds…