• 1 Department of Mathematics and Computer Science [Granville]
• 2 Department of Mathematics

Let $G$ be a simple graph with $n$ vertices. The coloring complex$ Δ (G)$ was defined by Steingrímsson, and the homology of $Δ (G)$ was shown to be nonzero only in dimension $n-3$ by Jonsson. Hanlon recently showed that the Eulerian idempotents provide a decomposition of the homology group $H_{n-3}(Δ (G))$ where the dimension of the $j^th$ component in the decomposition, $H_{n-3}^{(j)}(Δ (G))$, equals the absolute value of the coefficient of $λ ^j$ in the chromatic polynomial of $G, _{\mathcal{χg}}(λ )$. Let $H$ be a hypergraph with $n$ vertices. In this paper, we define the coloring complex of a hypergraph, $Δ (H)$, and show that the coefficient of $λ ^j$ in $χ _H(λ )$ gives the Euler Characteristic of the $j^{th}$ Hodge subcomplex of the Hodge decomposition of $Δ (H)$. We also examine conditions on a hypergraph, $H$, for which its Hodge subcomplexes are Cohen-Macaulay, and thus where the absolute value of the coefficient of $λ ^j$ in $χ _H(λ )$ equals the dimension of the $j^{th}$ Hodge piece of the Hodge decomposition of $Δ (H)$.