2,836 research outputs found
Intersecting families of discrete structures are typically trivial
The study of intersecting structures is central to extremal combinatorics. A
family of permutations is \emph{-intersecting} if
any two permutations in agree on some indices, and is
\emph{trivial} if all permutations in agree on the same
indices. A -uniform hypergraph is \emph{-intersecting} if any two of its
edges have vertices in common, and \emph{trivial} if all its edges share
the same vertices.
The fundamental problem is to determine how large an intersecting family can
be. Ellis, Friedgut and Pilpel proved that for sufficiently large with
respect to , the largest -intersecting families in are the trivial
ones. The classic Erd\H{o}s--Ko--Rado theorem shows that the largest
-intersecting -uniform hypergraphs are also trivial when is large. We
determine the \emph{typical} structure of -intersecting families, extending
these results to show that almost all intersecting families are trivial. We
also obtain sparse analogues of these extremal results, showing that they hold
in random settings.
Our proofs use the Bollob\'as set-pairs inequality to bound the number of
maximal intersecting families, which can then be combined with known stability
theorems. We also obtain similar results for vector spaces.Comment: 19 pages. Update 1: better citation of the Gauy--H\`an--Oliveira
result. Update 2: corrected statement of the unpublished Hamm--Kahn result,
and slightly modified notation in Theorem 1.6 Update 3: new title, updated
citations, and some minor correction
Minimum saturated families of sets
We call a family of subsets of -saturated if it
contains no pairwise disjoint sets, and moreover no set can be added to
while preserving this property (here ).
More than 40 years ago, Erd\H{o}s and Kleitman conjectured that an
-saturated family of subsets of has size at least . It is easy to show that every -saturated family has size at
least , but, as was mentioned by Frankl and Tokushige,
even obtaining a slightly better bound of , for some
fixed , seems difficult. In this note, we prove such a result,
showing that every -saturated family of subsets of has size at least
.
This lower bound is a consequence of a multipartite version of the problem,
in which we seek a lower bound on
where are families of subsets of ,
such that there are no pairwise disjoint sets, one from each family
, and furthermore no set can be added to any of the families
while preserving this property. We show that , which is tight e.g.\ by taking
to be empty, and letting the remaining families be the families
of all subsets of .Comment: 8 page
- …