On June 4, 2024, Jane Tan from University of Oxford gave a talk at the Discrete Math Seminar on coloring hypergraphs in such a way that every edge has many distinct colors. The title of her talk was “Semi-strong colourings of hypergraphs“.
A vertex colouring of a hypergraph is -strong if every edge sees at least distinct colours. Let denote the least number of colours needed so that every -intersecting hypergraph has a -strong colouring. In 2012, Blais, Weinstein and Yoshida introduced this parameter and initiated study on when is finite: they showed that is finite whenever and unbounded when . The boundary case has remained elusive for some time: is known to be finite by an easy classical result, and was shown to be finite by Chung and independently by Colucci and Gyárfás in 2013. In this talk, we present some recent work with Kevin Hendrey, Freddie Illingworth and Nina Kamčev in which we fill in this gap by showing that is finite in general.