We show for $k \geq 2$ that if $q\geq 3$ and $n \geq 2k+1$, or $q=2$ and $n \geq 2k+2$, then any intersecting family ${\cal F}$ of $k$-subspaces of an $n$-dimensional vector space over $GF(q)$ with $\bigcap_{F \in {\cal F}} F=0$ has size at most $\left[{n-1\atop k-1}\right]-q^{k(k-1)}\left[{n-k-1\atop k-1}\right]+q^k$. This bound is sharp as is shown by Hilton-Milner type families. As an application of this result, we determine the chromatic number of the corresponding $q$-Kneser graphs.

We prove a vector space analog of a version of the KruskalKatona theorem due to Lovász. We apply this result to extend Frankl's theorem on r-wise intersecting families to vector spaces. In particular, we obtain a short new proof of the Erdős-Ko-Rado theorem for vector spaces.

More than twenty-five years ago, Manickam, Miklós, and Singhi conjectured that for positive integers n, k with n ≥ 4k, every set of n real numbers with nonnegative sum has at least n−1 k−1 k-element subsets whose sum is also nonnegative. We verify this conjecture when n ≥ 8k 2 , which simultaneously improves and simplifies a bound of Alon, Huang, and Sudakov and also a bound of Pokrovskiy when k < 10 45 .Moreover, our arguments resolve the vector space analogue of this conjecture. Let V be an n-dimensional vector space over a finite field. Assign a real-valued weight to each 1-dimensional subspace in V so that the sum of all weights is zero. Define the weight of a subspace S ⊂ V to be the sum of the weights of all the 1-dimensional subspaces it contains. We prove that if n ≥ 3k, then the number of k-dimensional subspaces in V with nonnegative weight is at least the number of k-dimensional subspaces in V that contain a fixed 1-dimensional subspace. This result verifies a conjecture of Manickam and Singhi from 1988.

Let V be a vector space of dimension v over a field of order q. The q-Kneser graph has the kdimensional subspaces of V as its vertices, where two subspaces and are adjacent if and only if ∩ is the zero subspace. This paper is motivated by the problem of determining the chromatic numbers of these graphs. This problem is trivial when k = 1 (and the graphs are complete) or when v < 2k (and the graphs are empty). We establish some basic theory in the general case. Then specializing to the case k = 2, we show that the chromatic number is q 2 + q when v = 4 and (q v−1 − 1)/(q − 1) when v > 4. In both cases we characterise the minimal colourings.

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