English
Related papers

Related papers: Improved bounds for the sunflower lemma

200 papers

Robust sunflowers are a generalization of combinatorial sunflowers that have applications in monotone circuit complexity, DNF sparsification, randomness extractors, and recent advances on the Erd\H{o}s-Rado sunflower conjecture. The recent…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2022-08-08 Bruno Pasqualotto Cavalar , Mrinal Kumar , Benjamin Rossman

The famous Erd\H{o}s-Rado sunflower conjecture suggests that an $s$-sun\-flower-free family of $k$-element sets has size at most $(Cs)^k$ for some absolute constant $C$. In this note, we investigate the analog problem for $k$-spaces over…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-09-19 Ferdinand Ihringer , Andrey Kupavskii

The Erd\H{o}s--Rado sunflower problem admits two natural analogues in finite vector spaces, corresponding to two different ways of generalising the set-theoretic notion of a sunflower. The first, used by Ihringer and Kupavskii [FFA 110…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-05-13 Kamil Otal

A conjecture by Aharoni and Berger states that every family of $n$ matchings of size $n+1$ in a bipartite multigraph contains a rainbow matching of size $n$. In this paper we prove that matching sizes of $(3/2 + o(1)) n$ suffice to…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2015-03-03 Dennis Clemens , Julia Ehrenmüller

We study sunflowers within the context of finitely generated substructures of ultrahomogeneous structures. In particular, we look at bounds on how large a set system is needed to guarantee the existence of sunflowers of a given size. We…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2023-10-25 Nathanael Ackerman , Mostafa Mirabi

An "edge guard set" of a plane graph $G$ is a subset $\Gamma$ of edges of $G$ such that each face of $G$ is incident to an endpoint of an edge in $\Gamma$. Such a set is said to guard $G$. We improve the known upper bounds on the number of…

Computational Geometry · Computer Science 2018-04-20 Ahmad Biniaz , Prosenjit Bose , Aurélien Ooms , Sander Verdonschot

We prove that given a constant $k \ge 2$ and a large set system $\mathcal{F}$ of sets of size at most $w$, a typical $k$-tuple of sets $(S_1, \cdots, S_k)$ from $\mathcal{F}$ can be ``blown up" in the following sense: for each $1 \le i \le…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-06-03 Ryan Alweiss

We develop a new approach to approximate families of sets, complementing the existing `$\Delta$-system method' and `junta approximations method'. The approach, which we refer to as `spread approximations method', is based on the notion of…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-04-03 Andrey Kupavskii , Dmitriy Zakharov

Using the sunflower method, we show that if $\theta \in (0,1) \cap \mathbb{Q}$ and $\mathcal{F}$ is a $O(n^{1/3})$-bounded $\theta$-intersecting family over $[n]$, then $\lvert \mathcal{F} \rvert = O(n)$, and that if $\mathcal{F}$ is…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-09-17 Niranjan Balachandran , Shagnik Das , Brahadeesh Sankarnarayanan

We introduce \emph{moonflowers}, a weaker analogue of sunflowers. A family of sets $S_1,\ldots,S_k$ is a $k$-moonflower if each set $S_i$ contains at least one element that is absent from all the others. We study the extremal problem of…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-05-12 Shachar Lovett , Raghu Meka , Yimeng Wang

The Total Colouring Conjecture suggests that $\Delta+3$ colours ought to suffice in order to provide a proper total colouring of every graph $G$ with maximum degree $\Delta$. Thus far this has been confirmed up to an additive constant…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2017-03-02 Jakub Przybyło

Given a graph $G$, let $f_{G}(n,m)$ be the minimal number $k$ such that every $k$ independent $n$-sets in $G$ have a rainbow $m$-set. Let $\mathcal{D}(2)$ be the family of all graphs with maximum degree at most two. Aharoni et al. (2019)…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2021-08-24 Yue Ma , Xinmin Hou , Jun Gao , Boyuan Liu , Zhi Yin

This paper explores the structure of the combinatorial domain $2^X$ in relation to sunflowers. The previous study found some intrinsic properties of the $l$-extension \[ Ext \left( \mathcal{F}, l \right) = \left\{ V ~:~ V \in {X \choose…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-04-30 Junichiro Fukuyama

Let $G$ be a connected graph, and let $\lambda_1$ and $\rho$ denote the spectral radius of $G$ and the universal cover of $G$, respectively. In \cite{Fri03}, Friedman has shown that almost every $n$-lift of $G$ has all of its new…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2010-11-30 Edward Lui , Doron Puder

This note concerns a well-known result which we term the ``spread lemma,'' which establishes the existence (with high probability) of a desired structure in a random set. The spread lemma was central to two recent celebrated results: (a)…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2022-10-11 Elchanan Mossel , Jonathan Niles-Weed , Nike Sun , Ilias Zadik

Paul Erd\H{o}s and L\'{a}szl\'{o} Lov\'{a}sz proved in a landmark article that, for any positive integer $k$, up to isomorphism there are only finitely many maximal intersecting families of $k-$sets (maximal $k-$cliques). So they posed the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2014-03-03 Kaushik Majumder

We call a family of $s$ sets $\{F_1, \ldots, F_s\}$ a \textit{sunflower with $s$ petals} if, for any distinct $i, j \in [s]$, one has $F_i \cap F_j = \cap_{u = 1}^s F_u$. The set $C = \cap_{u = 1}^s F_u$ is called the {\it core} of the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-04-23 Andrey Kupavskii , Fedor Noskov

A $t$-intersecting constant dimension subspace code $C$ is a set of $k$-dimensional subspaces in a projective space PG(n,q), where distinct subspaces intersect in a $t$-dimensional subspace. A classical example of such a code is the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2021-05-24 Aart Blokhuis , Maarten De Boeck , Jozefien D'haeseleer

Alon, Shpilka and Umans considered the following version of usual sunflower-free subset: a subset $\mbox{$\cal F$}\subseteq \{1,\ldots ,D\}^n$ for $D>2$ is sunflower-free if for every distinct triple $x,y,z\in \mbox{$\cal F$}$ there exists…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2018-05-14 Gábor Hegedűs

It is well known that Erd\H{o}s Matching Conjecture concerns the maximum number of hyperedges in an $r$-uniform hypergraph with bounded matching number. As a generalization, it is natural to ask for the maximum number of copies of…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-05-07 Junpeng Zhou , Xiying Yuan