The Lubell bound for intersecting-union families
Combinatorics
2026-07-08 v1
Abstract
In a 2021 survey on Katona's circle method, Frankl conjectured that every family in which any two members intersect and no two members cover satisfies the sharp Lubell-type bound This improves the earlier estimate obtained by the circle method. In this paper, we prove Frankl's conjecture and determine all extremal families. Our proof replaces the cyclic permutation argument with a -biased measure framework on the Boolean lattice, and then integrates the resulting estimates over the full probability range. This continuous integration recovers the optimal coefficient , whereas the discrete averaging inherent in the circle method yields only .
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2607.07564,
title = {The Lubell bound for intersecting-union families},
author = {Yongjiang Wu and Lihua Feng},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.07564},
year = {2026}
}
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7 pages