English

Erd\H{o}s-Ko-Rado theorem and Hilton-Milner type theorem for $k$-partitions

Combinatorics 2025-10-27 v2

Abstract

A kk-partition of an nn-set XX is a collection of kk pairwise disjoint non-empty subsets whose union is XX. A family of kk-partitions of XX is called tt-intersecting if any two of its members share at least tt blocks. A tt-intersecting family is trivial if every kk-partition in it contains tt fixed blocks, and is non-trivial otherwise. In this paper, we first prove that, for nL(k,t):=(t+1)+(kt+1)log2(t+1)(kt+1)n\geq L(k,t):=(t+1)+(k-t+1)\cdot\log_2(t+1)(k-t+1), a tt-intersecting family with maximum size must consist of all kk-partitions containing tt fixed singletons. This improves the results given by Erd\H{o}s and Sz\'{e}kely (2000), and by Kupavskii (2023). We further determine the non-trivial tt-intersecting families of kk-partitions with maximum size for n2L(k,t)n \ge 2L(k,t), which turn out to be natural analogs of the corresponding families for finite sets. In addition, we prove a stability result.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.20251,
  title  = {Erd\H{o}s-Ko-Rado theorem and Hilton-Milner type theorem for $k$-partitions},
  author = {Jie Wen and Benjian Lv},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.20251},
  year   = {2025}
}