English

Partition-free families of sets

Combinatorics 2017-11-30 v1 Discrete Mathematics

Abstract

Let m(n)m(n) denote the maximum size of a family of subsets which does not contain two disjoint sets along with their union. In 1968 Kleitman proved that m(n)=(nm+1)++(n2m+1)m(n) = {n\choose m+1}+\ldots +{n\choose 2m+1} if n=3m+1n=3m+1. Confirming the conjecture of Kleitman, we establish the same equality for the cases n=3mn=3m and n=3m+2n=3m+2, and also determine all extremal families. Unlike the case n=3m+1n=3m+1, the extremal families are not unique. This is a plausible reason behind the relative difficulty of our proofs. We completely settle the case of several families as well.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1706.00215,
  title  = {Partition-free families of sets},
  author = {Peter Frankl and Andrey Kupavskii},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.00215},
  year   = {2017}
}