English

Intersecting families with covering number three II

Combinatorics 2026-05-12 v1

Abstract

A family F([n]k)\mathcal{F}\subset \binom{[n]}{k} is called intersecting if FFF\cap F'\neq \emptyset for all F,FFF,F'\in \mathcal{F}. The covering number of a family F\mathcal{F} is defined as the minimum size of T[n]T\subset [n] such that TFT\cap F\neq \emptyset for all FFF\in \mathcal{F}. In 1980, the first author proved that for sufficiently large nn, any intersecting kk-graph F\mathcal{F} with covering number at least three, satisfies F(n1k1)(nkk1)(nk1k1)+(n2kk1)+(nk2k3)+3|\mathcal{F}|\leq \binom{n-1}{k-1}-\binom{n-k}{k-1}-\binom{n-k-1}{k-1}+\binom{n-2k}{k-1}+\binom{n-k-2}{k-3}+3. There was very little progress during more than forty years but recently (cf. \cite{FW25}) with a completely different approach we proved the same result for the full range n2kn\geq 2k and k7k\geq 7. In this short paper we prove the same inequality for all the remaining cases.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.08603,
  title  = {Intersecting families with covering number three II},
  author = {Peter Frankl and Jian Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.08603},
  year   = {2026}
}