A new approach for the Brown-Erdős-Sós problem

Abstract

The celebrated Brown-Erd\H{o}s-S\'os conjecture states that for every fixed $e$, every $3$-uniform hypergraph with $\Omega(n^2)$ edges contains $e$ edges spanned by $e+3$ vertices. Up to this date all the approaches towards resolving this problem relied on highly involved applications of the hypergraph regularity method, and yet they supplied only approximate versions of the conjecture, producing $e$ edges spanned by $e+O(\log e/\log \log e)$ vertices. We describe a completely different approach, which reduces the problem to a variant of another well-known conjecture in extremal graph theory. A resolution of the latter would resolve the Brown-Erd\H{o}s-S\'os conjecture up to an absolute additive constant.