A quantitative Lovász criterion for Property B

Abstract

A well known observation of Lovász is that if a hypergraph is not $2$-colorable, then at least one pair of its edges intersect at a single vertex. %This very simple criterion turned out to be extremly useful . In this short paper we consider the quantitative version of Lovász's criterion. That is, we ask how many pairs of edges intersecting at a single vertex, should belong to a non $2$-colorable $n$-uniform hypergraph? Our main result is an {\em exact} answer to this question, which further characterizes all the extremal hypergraphs. The proof combines Bollobás's two families theorem with Pluhar's randomized coloring algorithm.

A note on Property B