Rainbow Fractional Matchings

We prove that any family E₁,.., E_┌rn┐ of (not necessarily distinct) sets of edges in an r-uniform hypergraph, each having a fractional matching of size n, has a rainbow fractional matching of size n (that is, a set of edges from distinct E_i’s which supports such a fractional matching). When the hypergraph is r-partite and n is an integer, the number of sets needed goes down from rn to rn−r+1. The problem solved here is a fractional version of the corresponding problem about rainbow matchings, which was solved by Drisko and by Aharoni and Berger in the case of bipartite graphs, but is open for general graphs as well as for r-partite hypergraphs with r>2. Our topological proof is based on a result of Kalai and Meshulam about a simplicial complex and a matroid on the same vertex set.