Search for: All records

Abstract We show that the base polytopeP_Mof any paving matroidMcan be systematically obtained from a hypersimplex by slicing off certain subpolytopes, namely base polytopes of lattice path matroids corresponding to panhandle-shaped Ferrers diagrams. We calculate the Ehrhart polynomials of these matroids and consequently write down the Ehrhart polynomial ofP_M, starting with Katzman’s formula for the Ehrhart polynomial of a hypersimplex. The method builds on and generalizes Ferroni’s work on sparse paving matroids. Combinatorially, our construction corresponds to constructing a uniform matroid from a paving matroid by iterating the operation ofstressed-hyperplane relaxationintroduced by Ferroni, Nasr and Vecchi, which generalizes the standard matroid-theoretic notion of circuit-hyperplane relaxation. We present evidence that panhandle matroids are Ehrhart positive and describe a conjectured combinatorial formula involving chain forests and Eulerian numbers from which Ehrhart positivity of panhandle matroids will follow. As an application of the main result, we calculate the Ehrhart polynomials of matroids associated with Steiner systems and finite projective planes, and show that they depend only on their design-theoretic parameters: for example, while projective planes of the same order need not have isomorphic matroids, their base polytopes must be Ehrhart equivalent. 

For an $$r$$-uniform hypergraph $$H$$, let $$\nu^{(m)}(H)$$ denote the maximum size of a set $$M$$ of edges in $$H$$ such that every two edges in $$M$$ intersect in less than $$m$$ vertices, and let $$\tau^{(m)}(H)$$ denote the minimum size of a collection $$C$$ of $$m$$-sets of vertices such that every edge in $$H$$ contains an element of $$C$$. The fractional analogues of these parameters are denoted by $$\nu^{*(m)}(H)$$ and $$\tau^{*(m)}(H)$$, respectively. Generalizing a famous conjecture of Tuza on covering triangles in a graph, Aharoni and Zerbib conjectured that for every $$r$$-uniform hypergraph $$H$$, $$\tau^{(r-1)}(H)/\nu^{(r-1)}(H) \leq \lceil{\frac{r+1}{2}}\rceil$$. In this paper we prove bounds on the ratio between the parameters $$\tau^{(m)}$$ and $$\nu^{(m)}$$, and their fractional analogues. Our main result is that, for every $$r$$-uniform hypergraph~$$H$$,\[ \tau^{*(r-1)}(H)/\nu^{(r-1)}(H) \le \begin{cases} \frac{3}{4}r - \frac{r}{4(r+1)} &\text{for }r\text{ even,}\\\frac{3}{4}r - \frac{r}{4(r+2)} &\text{for }r\text{ odd.} \\\end{cases} \]This improves the known bound of $$r-1$.We also prove that, for every $$r$$-uniform hypergraph $$H$$, $$\tau^{(m)}(H)/\nu^{*(m)}(H) \le \operatorname{ex}_m(r, m+1)$$, where the Turán number $$\operatorname{ex}_r(n, k)$$ is the maximum number of edges in an $$r$$-uniform hypergraph on $$n$$ vertices that does not contain a copy of the complete $$r$$-uniform hypergraph on $$k$$ vertices. Finally, we prove further bounds in the special cases $(r,m)=(4,2)$ and $(r,m)=(4,3)$.