The Exact Linear Turán Number of the Sail

A hypergraph is linear if any two of its edges intersect in at most one vertex. The sail (or $3$-fan) $F^3$ is the $3$-uniform linear hypergraph consisting of $3$ edges $f_1, f_2, f_3$ pairwise intersecting in the same vertex $v$ and an additional edge $g$ intersecting each $f_i$ in a vertex different from $v$. The linear Turán number $\mathrm{ex}_{\mathrm{lin}}(n, F^3)$ is the maximum number of edges in a $3$-uniform linear hypergraph on $n$ vertices that does not contain a copy of $F^3$. Füredi and Gyárfás proved that if $n = 3k$, then $\mathrm{ex}_{\mathrm{lin}}(n, F^3) = k^2$ and the only extremal hypergraphs in this case are transversal designs. They also showed that if $n = 3k+2$, then $\mathrm{ex}_{\mathrm{lin}}(n, F^3) = k^2+k$, and the only extremal hypergraphs are truncated designs (which are obtained from a transversal design on $3k+3$ vertices with $3$ groups by removing one vertex and all the hyperedges containing it) along with three other small hypergraphs. However, the case when $n =3k+1$ was left open. In this paper, we solve this remaining case by proving that $\mathrm{ex}_{\mathrm{lin}}(n, F^3) = k^2+1$ if $n = 3k+1$, answering a question of Füredi and Gyárfás. We also characterize all the extremal hypergraphs. The difficulty of this case is due to the fact that these extremal examples are rather non-standard. In particular, they are not derived from transversal designs like in the other cases.

On Turán exponents of bipartite graphs

A long-standing conjecture of Erdős and Simonovits asserts that for every rational number $r\in (1,2)$ there exists a bipartite graph H such that $\mathrm{ex}(n,H)=\Theta(n^r)$ . So far this conjecture is known to be true only for rationals of form $1+1/k$ and $2-1/k$ , for integers $k\geq 2$ . In this paper, we add a new form of rationals for which the conjecture is true: $2-2/(2k+1)$ , for $k\geq 2$ . This in turn also gives an affirmative answer to a question of Pinchasi and Sharir on cube-like graphs. Recently, a version of Erdős and Simonovits $^{\prime}$ s conjecture, where one replaces a single graph by a finite family, was confirmed by Bukh and Conlon. They proposed a construction of bipartite graphs which should satisfy Erdős and Simonovits $^{\prime}$ s conjecture. Our result can also be viewed as a first step towards verifying Bukh and Conlon $^{\prime}$ s conjecture. We also prove an upper bound on the Turán number of theta graphs in an asymmetric setting and employ this result to obtain another new rational exponent for Turán exponents: $r=7/5$ .