Splittable ideals and the resolutions of monomial ideals

We provide a new combinatorial approach to study the minimal free resolutions of edge ideals, that is, quadratic square-free monomial ideals. With this method we can recover most of the known results on resolutions of edge ideals with fuller generality, and at the same time, obtain new results. Past investigations on the resolutions of edge ideals usually reduced the problem to computing the dimensions of reduced homology or Koszul homology groups. Our approach circumvents the highly nontrivial problem of computing the dimensions of these groups and turns the problem into combinatorial questions about the associated simple graph. We also show that our technique extends successfully to the study of graded Betti numbers of arbitrary square-free monomial ideals viewed as facet ideals of simplicial complexes.