611 research outputs found
Hereditary properties of combinatorial structures: posets and oriented graphs
A hereditary property of combinatorial structures is a collection of
structures (e.g. graphs, posets) which is closed under isomorphism, closed
under taking induced substructures (e.g. induced subgraphs), and contains
arbitrarily large structures. Given a property P, we write P_n for the
collection of distinct (i.e., non-isomorphic) structures in a property P with n
vertices, and call the function n -> |P_n| the speed (or unlabelled speed) of
P. Also, we write P^n for the collection of distinct labelled structures in P
with vertices labelled 1,...,n, and call the function n -> |P^n| the labelled
speed of P.
The possible labelled speeds of a hereditary property of graphs have been
extensively studied, and the aim of this paper is to investigate the possible
speeds of other combinatorial structures, namely posets and oriented graphs.
More precisely, we show that (for sufficiently large n), the labelled speed of
a hereditary property of posets is either 1, or exactly a polynomial, or at
least 2^n - 1. We also show that there is an initial jump in the possible
unlabelled speeds of hereditary properties of posets, tournaments and directed
graphs, from bounded to linear speed, and give a sharp lower bound on the
possible linear speeds in each case.Comment: 26 pgs, no figure
The number of subsets of integers with no -term arithmetic progression
Addressing a question of Cameron and Erd\Ho s, we show that, for infinitely
many values of , the number of subsets of that do not
contain a -term arithmetic progression is at most , where
is the maximum cardinality of a subset of without
a -term arithmetic progression. This bound is optimal up to a constant
factor in the exponent. For all values of , we prove a weaker bound, which
is nevertheless sufficient to transfer the current best upper bound on
to the sparse random setting. To achieve these bounds, we establish a new
supersaturation result, which roughly states that sets of size
contain superlinearly many -term arithmetic progressions.
For integers and , Erd\Ho s asked whether there is a set of integers
with no -term arithmetic progression, but such that any -coloring
of yields a monochromatic -term arithmetic progression. Ne\v{s}et\v{r}il
and R\"odl, and independently Spencer, answered this question affirmatively. We
show the following density version: for every and , there
exists a reasonably dense subset of primes with no -term arithmetic
progression, yet every of size contains a
-term arithmetic progression.
Our proof uses the hypergraph container method, which has proven to be a very
powerful tool in extremal combinatorics. The idea behind the container method
is to have a small certificate set to describe a large independent set. We give
two further applications in the appendix using this idea.Comment: To appear in International Mathematics Research Notices. This is a
longer version than the journal version, containing two additional minor
applications of the container metho
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