Critical 3-hypergraphs (Q2108059)

The authors obtain a nice characterization for critical 3-hypergraphs. They obtained several related interesting results in their previous publications in the same journal. The proof given here for their main result is very deep and long with several lemmas and the notes on notations themselves are mindboggling. The ideas are very original. To obtain the characterization they conceive the notion of a module for a hypergraph and by using the modular decomposition tree they show that a necessary and sufficient condition for a 3-hypergraph to be realizable is that all its prime-induced subhypergraphs are realizable. They also showed earlier [Discrete Math. 277, No. 1--3, 29--43 (2004; Zbl 1037.05024)] that a given realizable 3-hypergraph \(H\) is prime if and only if all its realizations are prime. This stimulated them to probe the prime and induced subhypergraphs of a prime 3-hypergraph. Their characterization gives a simple method to construct critical 3-hypergraphs that are not realizable.