135 research outputs found
Colouring set families without monochromatic k-chains
A coloured version of classic extremal problems dates back to Erd\H{o}s and
Rothschild, who in 1974 asked which -vertex graph has the maximum number of
2-edge-colourings without monochromatic triangles. They conjectured that the
answer is simply given by the largest triangle-free graph. Since then, this new
class of coloured extremal problems has been extensively studied by various
researchers. In this paper we pursue the Erd\H{o}s--Rothschild versions of
Sperner's Theorem, the classic result in extremal set theory on the size of the
largest antichain in the Boolean lattice, and Erd\H{o}s' extension to
-chain-free families.
Given a family of subsets of , we define an
-colouring of to be an -colouring of the sets without
any monochromatic -chains . We
prove that for sufficiently large in terms of , the largest
-chain-free families also maximise the number of -colourings. We also
show that the middle level, , maximises the
number of -colourings, and give asymptotic results on the maximum
possible number of -colourings whenever is divisible by three.Comment: 30 pages, final versio
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