English

Rainbow matchings and algebras of sets

Combinatorics 2017-03-01 v3 Logic

Abstract

Grinblat (2002) asks the following question in the context of algebras of sets: What is the smallest number v=v(n)\mathfrak v = \mathfrak v(n) such that, if A1,,AnA_1, \ldots, A_n are nn equivalence relations on a common finite ground set XX, such that for each ii there are at least v\mathfrak v elements of XX that belong to AiA_i-equivalence classes of size larger than 11, then XX has a rainbow matching---a set of 2n2n distinct elements a1,b1,,an,bna_1, b_1, \ldots, a_n, b_n, such that aia_i is AiA_i-equivalent to bib_i for each ii? Grinblat has shown that v(n)10n/3+O(n)\mathfrak v(n) \le 10n/3 + O(\sqrt{n}). He asks whether v(n)=3n2\mathfrak v(n) = 3n-2 for all n4n\ge 4. In this paper we improve the upper bound (for all large enough nn) to v(n)16n/5+O(1)\mathfrak v(n) \le 16n/5 + O(1).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1503.03671,
  title  = {Rainbow matchings and algebras of sets},
  author = {Gabriel Nivasch and Eran Omri},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1503.03671},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

Revision taking into account referees' comments. 12 pages, 7 figures