English

Infinite Sperner's theorem

Combinatorics 2020-08-14 v2

Abstract

One of the most classical results in extremal set theory is Sperner's theorem, which says that the largest antichain in the Boolean lattice 2[n]2^{[n]} has size Θ(2nn)\Theta\big(\frac{2^n}{\sqrt{n}}\big). Motivated by an old problem of Erd\H{o}s on the growth of infinite Sidon sequences, in this note we study the growth rate of maximum infinite antichains. Using the well known Kraft's inequality for prefix codes, it is not difficult to show that infinite antichains should be "thinner" than the corresponding finite ones. More precisely, if F2N\mathcal{F}\subset 2^{\mathbb{N}} is an antichain, then lim infnF2[n](2nnlogn)1=0.\liminf_{n\rightarrow \infty}\big|\mathcal{F} \cap 2^{[n]}\big|\left(\frac{2^n}{n\log n}\right)^{-1}=0. Our main result shows that this bound is essentially tight, that is, we construct an antichain F\mathcal{F} such that lim infnF2[n](2nnlogCn)1>0\liminf_{n\rightarrow \infty}\big|\mathcal{F} \cap 2^{[n]}\big|\left(\frac{2^n}{n\log^{C} n}\right)^{-1}>0 holds for some absolute constant C>0C>0.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2008.04804,
  title  = {Infinite Sperner's theorem},
  author = {Benny Sudakov and István Tomon and Adam Zsolt Wagner},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.04804},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

9 pages, 1 figure. D\"om\"ot\"or P\'alv\"olgyi brought to our attention that Kraft's inequality for prefix codes can be used to simplify our argument for the upper bound

R2 v1 2026-06-23T17:46:57.765Z