Problems
Everything in the archive: the problem as it was posed, what has been attempted against it, and who checked each attempt. The mark down the left of the list says who has looked — a person, a machine, or nobody yet. Human reviews and machine checks are counted separately and are never added together.
38 problems
Araujo, Piga and Schacht asked whether density and codegree both above 1/4 force a tight Hamilton cycle in a linearly quasirandom 3-graph. No: the threshold is p_0 = max_0 ≤ x ≤ 1minx^3, 1-x ≈ 0.3177, and below it there are dense 3-graphs…
Sivaraman asked whether perfect divisibility is characterized by its chromatic consequence: is a graph G perfectly divisible if and only if χ(H) ≤ binomω(H)+12 for every induced subgraph H of G? False: the Paley graph P(17) satisfies the…
For a forbidden configuration F, the Anstee-Sali conjecture predicts that forb(m, F) is Theta(m^(X(F)-1)), where X(F) comes from an explicit product construction. Disproved: the 4-uniform family on six vertices formed by a two-vertex core…
Reading computed the order dimension of the poset of regions for most finite Coxeter arrangements, observed that an exceptional type whose dimension exceeds its rank would be the first known simplicial arrangement with that property, and…
The near-quadratic Elekes-Ronyai expander conjecture over R predicts that a nonspecial polynomial expands any finite set to near-quadratic size. False: a fixed nonspecial quadratic polynomial, together with arbitrarily large finite sets of…
If a finite graph has girth at least five, must its minimum dual degree satisfy δ^*(G) ≤ -∂_n(G), where ∂_n(G) is the smallest eigenvalue of its distance matrix? The Hoffman-Singleton graph violates it: dual degree 7 against eigenvalue…
Monical, Tokcan and Yong conjectured that Schubitopes, the generalized permutahedra arising as Newton polytopes of Schubert polynomials and of Demazure characters of GL_n, are Ehrhart positive. Disproved by an explicit Schubitope whose…
For a bipartite graph without isolated vertices and with a unique minimum dominating set, does the proposed function m(n, γ) bound the number of edges whenever γ ≥ 2 and n ≥ 3γ? A 13-vertex bipartite graph with 22 edges exceeds the…
Mihail and Vazirani conjectured that the graph of every 0/1-polytope has edge expansion at least one. Disproved by a family of 0/1-polytopes whose edge expansion decreases exponentially in the dimension.
If a chromatic symmetric function is Schur positive, must every finite-variable specialization X_G(x_1, …, x_k) have a saturated Newton polytope? A 12-vertex bipartite graph realizes weights (6,6,0) and (8,2,2) but omits their midpoint…
An ℓ-Oddtown is a family of subsets of an n-element set whose set sizes are not divisible by ℓ while all pairwise intersection sizes are. Berlekamp and Graver showed the maximum size is n for prime ℓ, Babai and Frankl extended this to…
The paper constructs an exact cluster F⊆Z^2 of cardinality 8 with full affine span and an F-tiling whose orbit closure contains no 1-periodic F-tiling, giving a non-degenerate counterexample to Nivat's conjecture for non-convex windows.…
Are the Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomials of matroids always unimodal - in particular log-concave, or even real-rooted, as conjectured? No: representable matroids obtained by deleting points from finite projective geometries have non-unimodal…
Is the difference between the numbers of positive and negative adjacency eigenvalues of every connected line graph at most one? A 14-vertex witness has signature 2, and chaining copies gives connected line graphs of signature k + 1 for…
Can a finite set of lattice points determine many rectangles but few isosceles triangles? Both parts of the governing question have negative answers, quantified by explicit blowup rates, and the resulting configurations give obstructions…
Is the sequence W_0, W_1, …, W_n counting the flats of each rank of a matroid always unimodal? Rota conjectured yes in 1970.
Mason conjectured the following: let M be a matroid of rank r, and let W_i denote the number of flats of M of rank i. Is it true that for all 1 ≤ i ≤ r - 1, we have W_i^2 ≥ W_i + 1W_i - 1? This is false; a counterexample is given by a…
Erdos and Szemeredi conjectured that every finite set of reals satisfies max(|A+A|,|AA|) ≥ |A|^2-o(1). False: there are arbitrarily large A ⊂ R, of algebraic integers in a number field of degree asymp log|A|, with max(|A+A|,|AA|) ≤ |A|^2-c…
Let T_k be the least t such that every equinumerous t-coloring of [tn] contains a rainbow k-term arithmetic progression. Jungic, Licht, Mahdian, Nesetril and Radoicic conjectured T_k = Θ(k^2); Conlon, Fox and Sudakov proved T_k = O(k^2 log…
Akbari, Alikhani, Oboudi and Peng conjectured in 2010 that 0 and -2 are the only integer roots of the domination polynomial D(G, x), proven for trees and unicyclic graphs and verified exhaustively for small orders. The paper gives a…