Odd Covers of Complete Graphs and Hypergraphs

TL;DR

This paper proves a conjecture about the odd cover number of complete graphs, extends results to hypergraphs, and provides new constructions and bounds for various cases, advancing understanding of odd covers in graph theory.

Contribution

It confirms the conjecture that the odd cover number of complete graphs is always (n+1)/2 for odd n and provides exact values and bounds for hypergraphs and even n cases.

Findings

Odd cover number of K_n is (n+1)/2 for odd n.

Odd cover number of K_n^{(3)} is n/2 for even n.

For r=3,4, the odd cover number is less than the partition number.

Abstract

The `odd cover number' of a complete graph is the smallest size of a family of complete bipartite graphs that covers each edge an odd number of times. For $n$ odd, Buchanan, Clifton, Culver, Nie, O'Neill, Rombach and Yin showed that the odd cover number of $K_n$ is equal to $(n+1)/2$ or $(n+3)/2$, and they conjectured that it is always $(n+1)/2$. We prove this conjecture. For $n$ even, Babai and Frankl showed that the odd cover number of $K_n$ is always at least $n/2$, and the above authors and Radhakrishnan, Sen and Vishwanathan gave some values of $n$ for which equality holds. We give some new examples. Our constructions arise from some very symmetric constructions for the corresponding problem for complete hypergraphs. Thus the odd cover number of the complete 3-graph $K_n^{(3)}$ is the smallest number of complete 3-partite 3-graphs such that each 3-set is in an odd number of them. We show that the odd cover number of $K_n^{(3)}$ is exactly $n/2$ for even $n$, and we show that for odd $n$ it is $(n-1)/2$ for infinitely many values of $n$. We also show that for $r=3$ and $r=4$ the odd cover number of $K_n^{(r)}$ is strictly less than the partition number, answering a question of Buchanan, Clifton, Culver, Nie, O'Neill, Rombach and Yin for those values of $r$.