The Zeta Function of a Hypergraph

We generalize the Ihara-Selberg zeta function to hypergraphs in a natural way. Hashimoto’s factorization results for biregular bipartite graphs apply, leading to exact factorizations. For (d, r)-regular hypergraphs, we show that a modified Riemann hypothesis is true if and only if the hypergraph is Ramanujan in the sense of Winnie Li and Patrick Solé. Finally, we give an example to show how the generalized zeta function can be applied to graphs to distinguish non-isomorphic graphs with the same Ihara-Selberg zeta function.