Extremal hypergraphs for Ryser's Conjecture

Abstract

Ryser's Conjecture states that any r-partite r-uniform hypergraph has a vertex cover of size at most r−1 times the size of the largest matching. For r=2, the conjecture is simply König's Theorem and every bipartite graph is a witness for its tightness. The conjecture has also been proven for r=3 by Aharoni using topological methods, but the proof does not give information on the extremal 3-uniform hypergraphs. Our goal in this paper is to characterize those hypergraphs which are tight for Aharoni's Theorem.Our proof of this characterization is also based on topological machinery, particularly utilizing results on the (topological) connectedness of the independence complex of the line graph of the link graphs of 3-uniform Ryser-extremal hypergraphs. We use this information to nail down the elements of a structure we call home-base hypergraph. While there is a single minimal home-base hypergraph with matching number k for every positive integer k∈N, home-base hypergraphs with matching number k are far from being unique. There are infinitely many of them and each of them is composed of k copies of two different kinds of basic structures, whose hyperedges can intersect in various restricted, but intricate ways.Our characterization also proves an old and wide open strengthening of Ryser's Conjecture, due to Lovász, for the 3-uniform extremal case, that is, for hypergraphs with τ=2ν.