English

Tight bounds for Katona's shadow intersection theorem

Combinatorics 2020-05-15 v1

Abstract

A fundamental result in extremal set theory is Katona's shadow intersection theorem, which extends the Kruskal-Katona theorem by giving a lower bound on the size of the shadow of an intersecting family of kk-sets in terms of its size. We improve this classical result and a related result of Ahlswede, Aydinian, and Khachatrian by proving tight bounds for families that can be quite small. For example, when k=3k=3 our result is sharp for all families with nn points and at least 3n73n-7 triples. Katona's theorem was extended by Frankl to families with matching number ss. We improve Frankl's result by giving tight bounds for large nn.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2005.06999,
  title  = {Tight bounds for Katona's shadow intersection theorem},
  author = {Xizhi Liu and Dhruv Mubayi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.06999},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

20 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-23T15:32:54.424Z