410 research outputs found
On the Duality of Semiantichains and Unichain Coverings
We study a min-max relation conjectured by Saks and West: For any two posets
and the size of a maximum semiantichain and the size of a minimum
unichain covering in the product are equal. For positive we state
conditions on and that imply the min-max relation. Based on these
conditions we identify some new families of posets where the conjecture holds
and get easy proofs for several instances where the conjecture had been
verified before. However, we also have examples showing that in general the
min-max relation is false, i.e., we disprove the Saks-West conjecture.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure
On Saturated -Sperner Systems
Given a set , a collection is said to
be -Sperner if it does not contain a chain of length under set
inclusion and it is saturated if it is maximal with respect to this property.
Gerbner et al. conjectured that, if is sufficiently large with respect to
, then the minimum size of a saturated -Sperner system
is . We disprove this conjecture
by showing that there exists such that for every and there exists a saturated -Sperner system
with cardinality at most
.
A collection is said to be an
oversaturated -Sperner system if, for every
, contains more
chains of length than . Gerbner et al. proved that, if
, then the smallest such collection contains between and
elements. We show that if ,
then the lower bound is best possible, up to a polynomial factor.Comment: 17 page
The leafage of a chordal graph
The leafage l(G) of a chordal graph G is the minimum number of leaves of a
tree in which G has an intersection representation by subtrees. We obtain upper
and lower bounds on l(G) and compute it on special classes. The maximum of l(G)
on n-vertex graphs is n - lg n - (1/2) lg lg n + O(1). The proper leafage l*(G)
is the minimum number of leaves when no subtree may contain another; we obtain
upper and lower bounds on l*(G). Leafage equals proper leafage on claw-free
chordal graphs. We use asteroidal sets and structural properties of chordal
graphs.Comment: 19 pages, 3 figure
Chains, Antichains, and Complements in Infinite Partition Lattices
We consider the partition lattice on any set of transfinite
cardinality and properties of whose analogues do not hold
for finite cardinalities. Assuming the Axiom of Choice we prove: (I) the
cardinality of any maximal well-ordered chain is always exactly ; (II)
there are maximal chains in of cardinality ; (III) if,
for every cardinal , we have , there
exists a maximal chain of cardinality (but ) in
; (IV) every non-trivial maximal antichain in has
cardinality between and , and these bounds are realized.
Moreover we can construct maximal antichains of cardinality for any ; (V) all cardinals of the form
with occur as the number of
complements to some partition , and only these
cardinalities appear. Moreover, we give a direct formula for the number of
complements to a given partition; (VI) Under the Generalized Continuum
Hypothesis, the cardinalities of maximal chains, maximal antichains, and
numbers of complements are fully determined, and we provide a complete
characterization.Comment: 24 pages, 2 figures. Submitted to Algebra Universalis on 27/11/201
Set Systems Containing Many Maximal Chains
The purpose of this short problem paper is to raise an extremal question on
set systems which seems to be natural and appealing. Our question is: which set
systems of a given size maximise the number of -element chains in the
power set ? We will show that for each fixed
there is a family of sets containing
such chains, and that this is asymptotically best possible. For smaller set
systems we are unable to answer the question. We conjecture that a `tower of
cubes' construction is extremal. We finish by mentioning briefly a connection
to an extremal problem on posets and a variant of our question for the grid
graph.Comment: 5 page
A scattering of orders
A linear ordering is scattered if it does not contain a copy of the rationals. Hausdorff characterised the class of scattered linear orderings as the least family of linear orderings that includes the class of well-orderings and reversed well-orderings, and is closed under lexicographic sums with index set in . More generally, we say that a partial ordering is -scattered if it does not contain a copy of any -dense linear ordering. We prove analogues of Hausdorff's result for -scattered linear orderings, and for -scattered partial orderings satisfying the finite antichain condition. We also study the -scattered partial orderings, where is the saturated linear ordering of cardinality , and a partial ordering is -scattered when it embeds no copy of . We classify the -scattered partial orderings with the finite antichain condition relative to the -scattered linear orderings. We show that in general the property of being a -scattered linear ordering is not absolute, and argue that this makes a classification theorem for such orderings hard to achieve without extra set-theoretic assumptions
On Ordinal Invariants in Well Quasi Orders and Finite Antichain Orders
We investigate the ordinal invariants height, length, and width of well quasi
orders (WQO), with particular emphasis on width, an invariant of interest for
the larger class of orders with finite antichain condition (FAC). We show that
the width in the class of FAC orders is completely determined by the width in
the class of WQOs, in the sense that if we know how to calculate the width of
any WQO then we have a procedure to calculate the width of any given FAC order.
We show how the width of WQO orders obtained via some classical constructions
can sometimes be computed in a compositional way. In particular, this allows
proving that every ordinal can be obtained as the width of some WQO poset. One
of the difficult questions is to give a complete formula for the width of
Cartesian products of WQOs. Even the width of the product of two ordinals is
only known through a complex recursive formula. Although we have not given a
complete answer to this question we have advanced the state of knowledge by
considering some more complex special cases and in particular by calculating
the width of certain products containing three factors. In the course of
writing the paper we have discovered that some of the relevant literature was
written on cross-purposes and some of the notions re-discovered several times.
Therefore we also use the occasion to give a unified presentation of the known
results
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