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It is well known that an intersecting family of subsets of an n-element set can contain at most 2^(n-1) sets. It is natural to wonder how `close' to intersecting a family of size greater than 2^(n-1) can be. Katona, Katona and Katona…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2011-08-30 Paul A. Russell , Mark Walters

Given a set $X$, the power set $\mathbb{P}(X)$, and a finite poset $P$, a family $F\subset \mathbb{P}(X)$ is said to be induced-$P$-free if there is no injection $\phi: P\rightarrow \mathbb{F}$ such that $\phi(p)\subseteq\phi(q)$ if and…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-06-02 Ryan R Martin , Nick Veldt

Frankl--Pach and Erd\H{o}s conjectured that any $(d+1)$-uniform set family $\mathcal{F}\subseteq \binom{[n]}{d+1}$ with VC-dimension at most $d$ has size at most $\binom{n-1}{d}$ when $n$ is sufficiently large. Ahlswede and Khachatrian…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-03-24 Ting-Wei Chao , Zixuan Xu , Dmitrii Zakharov

A sunflower with $r$ petals is a collection of $r$ sets over a ground set $X$ such that every element in $X$ is in no set, every set, or exactly one set. Erd\H{o}s and Rado \cite{er} showed that a family of sets of size $n$ contains a…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2023-07-20 Jeremy Chizewer

For a given fixed poset $\mathcal P$ we say that a family of subsets of $[n]$ is $\mathcal P$-saturated if it does not contain an induced copy of $\mathcal P$, but whenever we add to it a new set, an induced copy of $\mathcal P$ is formed.…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-04-01 Maria-Romina Ivan

A family $\mathcal{A}$ of sets is said to be intersecting if every two sets in $\mathcal{A}$ intersect. Two families $\mathcal{A}$ and $\mathcal{B}$ are said to be cross-intersecting if each set in $\mathcal{A}$ intersects each set in…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2017-06-20 Peter Borg

A family of sets is union-free if there are no three distinct sets in the family such that the union of two of the sets is equal to the third set. Kleitman proved that every union-free family has size at most $(1+o(1))\binom{n}{n/2}$.…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2016-01-15 Jozsef Balogh , Adam Zsolt Wagner

A family $F$ of sets is said to be $t$-intersecting if $|A \cap B| \geq t$ for any $A,B \in F$. The seminal Complete Intersection Theorem of Ahlswede and Khachatrian (1997) gives the maximal size $f(n,k,t)$ of a $t$-intersecting family of…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2018-03-05 David Ellis , Nathan Keller , Noam Lifshitz

Let $P$ be a partially ordered set. The function $\mbox{La}^{\#}(n,P)$ denotes the size of the largest family $\mathcal{F}\subset 2^{[n]}$ that does not contain an induced copy of $P$. It was proved by Methuku and P\'alv\"olgyi that there…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2017-08-28 István Tomon

Let \cal A be a family of subsets of an n-set such that \cal A does not contain distinct sets A and B with |A\B| = 2|B\A|. How large can \cal A be? Our aim in this note is to determine the maximum size of such an \cal A. This answers a…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2011-01-24 Imre Leader , Eoin Long

We study the supersaturation problems of oddtown and eventown. Given a family $\mathcal A$ of subsets of an $n$ element set, let $op(\mathcal A)$ denote the number of distinct pairs $A,B\in \mathcal A$ for which $|A \cap B|$ is odd. We show…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2023-07-18 Xin Wei , Yuhao Zhao , Xiande Zhang , Gennian Ge

In 2008, Halman showed that for any finite set $P\subset \mathbb R^d$ and any finite family $\mathcal{B}$ of axis-parallel boxes in $\mathbb{R}^d$, if the intersection of $P$ and any subfamily $\mathcal{B}' \subseteq\mathcal{B}$ of size at…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-09-17 Rahul Gangopadhyay , Alexander Polyanskii , Wei Rao

The Galvin problem asks for the minimum size of a family $\mathcal{F} \subseteq \binom{[n]}{n/2}$ with the property that, for any set $A$ of size $\frac n 2$, there is a set $S \in \mathcal{F}$ which is balanced on $A$, meaning that $|S…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2019-01-10 Johan Håstad , Guillaume Lagarde , Joseph Swernofsky

A set of integers is sum-free if it contains no solution to the equation $x+y=z$. We study sum-free subsets of the set of integers $[n]=\{1,\ldots,n\}$ for which the integer $2n+1$ cannot be represented as a sum of their elements. We prove…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2018-12-27 Ishay Haviv

An old problem of Moser asks: how large of a union-free subfamily does every family of m sets have? A family of sets is called union-free if there are no three distinct sets in the family such that the union of two of the sets is equal to…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2011-03-17 Jacob Fox , Choongbum Lee , Benny Sudakov

The purpose of this short problem paper is to raise an extremal question on set systems which seems to be natural and appealing. Our question is: which set systems of a given size maximise the number of $(n+1)$-element chains in the power…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2019-02-20 J. Robert Johnson , Imre Leader , Paul A. Russell

Given a finite poset $\mathcal P$, how small can a family $\mathcal F$ of subsets of $[n]$ be such that $\mathcal F$ does not contain an induced copy of $\mathcal P$, but $\mathcal F\cup\{X\}$ contains such a copy for all $X\in\mathcal…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-04-29 Maria-Romina Ivan , Nandi Wang

A family of sets is said to be intersecting if every pair of sets in the family have non-empty intersection. In this paper, we initiate the study of intersecting non-uniform families of sets of one of two sizes containing given subfamilies.…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2019-02-19 Carl Feghali

Two families $\mathcal{A}$ and $\mathcal{B}$ of sets are said to be cross-$t$-intersecting if each set in $\mathcal{A}$ intersects each set in $\mathcal{B}$ in at least $t$ elements. An active problem in extremal set theory is to determine…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2015-12-31 Peter Borg

The well-known Erd\H{o}s--Ko--Rado theorem states that for $n> 2k$, every intersecting family of $k$-sets of $[n]:=\{1,\ldots ,n\}$ has at most $ {n-1 \choose k-1}$ sets, and the extremal family consists of all $k$-sets containing a fixed…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-07-02 Yongjiang Wu , Yongtao Li , Lihua Feng , Jiuqiang Liu , Guihai Yu