The Width of Downsets
Combinatorics
2019-01-16 v2
Abstract
How large an antichain can we find inside a given downset in the lattice of subsets of [n]? Sperner's theorem asserts that the largest antichain in the whole lattice has size the binomial coefficient C(n, n/2); what happens for general downsets? Our main results are a Dilworth-type decomposition theorem for downsets, and a new proof of a result of Engel and Leck that determines the largest possible antichain size over all downsets of a given size. We also prove some related results, such as determining the maximum size of an antichain inside the downset that we conjecture minimizes this quantity among downsets of a given size.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1710.05714,
title = {The Width of Downsets},
author = {Dwight Duffus and David Howard and Imre Leader},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.05714},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
18 pages, 3 figures