A Note on Intersecting Hypergraphs with Large Cover Number

Abstract

We give a construction of $r$-partite $r$-uniform intersecting hypergraphs with cover number at least $r-4$ for all but finitely many $r$. This answers a question of Abu-Khazneh, Barát, Pokrovskiy and Szabó, and shows that a long-standing unsolved conjecture due to Ryser is close to being best possible for every value of $r$.