Peter Keevash
University of Oxford
Thursday 28 September 2023, 4.00pm – 5.00pm
Lecture Theatre D (Mathematical Institute)
Hypergraph decompositions and their applications
Many combinatorial objects can be thought of as a hypergraph decomposition, i.e. a partition of (the edge set of) one hypergraph into (the edge sets of) copies of some other hypergraphs. For example, a Steiner Triple System is equivalent to a decomposition of a complete graph into triangles. In general, Steiner Systems are equivalent to decompositions of complete uniform hypergraphs into other complete uniform hypergraphs (of some specified sizes). The Existence Conjecture for Combinatorial Designs, which I proved in 2014, states that, bar finitely many exceptions, such decompositions exist whenever the necessary `divisibility conditions' hold. I also obtained a generalisation to the quasirandom setting, which implies an approximate formula for the number of designs; in particular, this resolved Wilson's Conjecture on the number of Steiner Triple Systems. A more general result that I proved in 2018 on decomposing lattice-valued vectors indexed by labelled complexes provides many further existence and counting results for a wide range of combinatorial objects, such as resolvable designs (the generalised form of Kirkman's Schoolgirl Problem), whist tournaments or generalised Sudoku squares. In this talk, I plan to illustrate these results and discuss some recent and ongoing developments.
series: Pure Mathematics Colloquium
organiser: Scott Harper