We show that an $n$-uniform maximal intersecting family has size at most $e^{-n^{0.5+o(1)}}n^n$. This improves a recent bound by Frankl ((2019) Comb. Probab. Comput. 28(5) 733–739.). The Spread Lemma of Alweiss et al. ((2020) Proceedings of the 52nd Annual ACM SIGACT Symposium on Theory of Computing.) plays an important role in the proof.

In 1975 Bollobás, Erdős, and Szemerédi asked the following question: given positive integers $n, t, r$ with $2\le t\le r-1$ , what is the largest minimum degree $\delta (G)$ among all $r$ -partite graphs $G$ with parts of size $n$ and which do not contain a copy of $K_{t+1}$ ? The $r=t+1$ case has attracted a lot of attention and was fully resolved by Haxell and Szabó, and Szabó and Tardos in 2006. In this article, we investigate the $r\gt t+1$ case of the problem, which has remained dormant for over 40 years. We resolve the problem exactly in the case when $r \equiv -1 \pmod{t}$ , and up to an additive constant for many other cases, including when $r \geq (3t-1)(t-1)$ . Our approach utilizes a connection to the related problem of determining the maximum of the minimum degrees among the family of balanced $r$ -partite $rn$ -vertex graphs of chromatic number at most $t$ .

Let G be a simple graph that is properly edge-coloured with m colours and let \[\mathcal{M} = \{ {M_1},...,{M_m}\} \] be the set of m matchings induced by the colours in G. Suppose that \[m \leqslant n - {n^c}\], where \[c > 9/10\], and every matching in \[\mathcal{M}\] has size n. Then G contains a full rainbow matching, i.e. a matching that contains exactly one edge from Mi for each \[1 \leqslant i \leqslant m\]. This answers an open problem of Pokrovskiy and gives an affirmative answer to a generalization of a special case of a conjecture of Aharoni and Berger. Related results are also found for multigraphs with edges of bounded multiplicity, and for hypergraphs.

Finally, we provide counterexamples to several conjectures on full rainbow matchings made by Aharoni and Berger.

A celebrated theorem of Pippenger states that any almost regular hypergraph with small codegrees has an almost perfect matching. We show that one can find such an almost perfect matching which is ‘pseudorandom’, meaning that, for instance, the matching contains as many edges from a given set of edges as predicted by a heuristic argument.

It follows from known results that every regular tripartite hypergraph of positive degree, with n vertices in each class, has matching number at least n/2. This bound is best possible, and the extremal configuration is unique. Here we prove a stability version of this statement, establishing that every regular tripartite hypergraph with matching number at most (1 + ϵ)n/2 is close in structure to the extremal configuration, where ‘closeness’ is measured by an explicit function of ϵ.

Hall's theorem for bipartite graphs gives a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a matching in a given bipartite graph. Aharoni and Ziv have generalized the notion of matchability to a pair of possibly infinite matroids on the same set and given a condition that is sufficient for the matchability of a given pair $(\mathcal{M},\mathcal{W})$ of finitary matroids, where the matroid $\mathcal{M}$ is SCF (a sum of countably many matroids of finite rank). The condition of Aharoni and Ziv is not necessary for matchability. The paper gives a condition that is necessary for the existence of a matching for any pair of matroids (not necessarily finitary) and is sufficient for any pair $(\mathcal{M},\mathcal{W})$ of finitary matroids, where the matroid $\mathcal{M}$ is SCF.