English

Forbidden induced subposets of given height

Combinatorics 2017-08-28 v1

Abstract

Let PP be a partially ordered set. The function \mboxLa#(n,P)\mbox{La}^{\#}(n,P) denotes the size of the largest family F2[n]\mathcal{F}\subset 2^{[n]} that does not contain an induced copy of PP. It was proved by Methuku and P\'alv\"olgyi that there exists a constant CPC_{P} (depending only on PP) such that \mboxLa#(n,P)<CP(nn/2)\mbox{La}^{\#}(n,P)<C_{P}\binom{n}{\lfloor n/2\rfloor}. However, the order of the constant CPC_{P} following from their proof is typically exponential in P|P|. Here, we show that if the height of the poset is constant, this can be improved. We show that for every positive integer hh there exists a constant chc_{h} such that if PP has height at most hh, then \mboxLa#(n,P)Pch(nn/2).\mbox{La}^{\#}(n,P)\leq |P|^{c_{h}}\binom{n}{\lfloor n/2\rfloor}. Our methods also immediately imply that similar bounds hold in grids as well. That is, we show that if F[k]n\mathcal{F}\subset [k]^{n} such that F\mathcal{F} does not contain an induced copy of PP and n2Pn\geq 2|P|, then FPchw,|\mathcal{F}|\leq |P|^{c_{h}}w, where ww is the width of [k]n[k]^{n}. A small part of our proof is to partition 2[n]2^{[n]} (or [k]n[k]^{n}) into certain fixed dimensional grids of large sides. We show that this special partition can be used to derive bounds in a number of other extremal set theoretical problems and their generalizations in grids, such as the size of families avoiding weak posets, Boolean algebras, or two distinct sets and their union. This might be of independent interest.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1708.07711,
  title  = {Forbidden induced subposets of given height},
  author = {István Tomon},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1708.07711},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

17 pages, 2 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T21:23:31.561Z