A paintability version of the combinatorial nullstellensatz, and list colorings of k-partite k-uniform hypergraphs

Abstract

We study the list coloring number of k-uniform k-partite hypergraphs. An- swering a question of Ramamurthi and West, we present a new upper bound which generalizes Alon and Tarsi's bound for bipartite graphs, the case k = 2. Our results hold even for paintability (on-line list colorability). To prove this additional strengthening, we provide a new subject-specific version of the Combinatorial Nullstellensatz.