Related papers: The sandglass conjecture beyond cancellative pairs

A family of sets $\mathcal{A}$ is union-closed if it is finite and nonempty with member sets that are all finite and distinct (at least one of which is nonempty) and it satisfies the property $X, Y \in \mathcal{A} \implies X \cup Y \in…

For $n \geq 2$ we construct a measurable subset of the unit ball in $\mathbb{R}^n$ that does not contain pairs of points at distance 1 and whose volume is greater than $(1/2)^n$ times the volume of the ball. This disproves a conjecture of…

A family of sets is called union-closed if whenever $A$ and $B$ are sets of the family, so is $A\cup B$. The long-standing union-closed conjecture states that if a family of subsets of $[n]$ is union-closed, some element appears in at least…

Two new sufficient conditions for generalized cycles (including Hamilton and dominating cycles as special cases) in an arbitrary k-connected graph (k=1,2,...) are derived, which prove the truth of Bondy's (1980) famous conjecture for some…

Let $I$ be an intersection of three monomial prime ideals of a polynomial algebra $S$ over a field. We give a special Stanley decomposition of $I$ which provides a lower bound of the Stanley depth of $I$, greater than or equal to $\depth\…

The famous strongly binary Goldbach's conjecture asserts that every even number $2n \geq 8$ can always be expressible as the sum of two distinct odd prime numbers. We use a new approach to dealing with this conjecture. Specifically, we…

A well-known result of Bollob\'as says that if $\{(A_i, B_i)\}_{i=1}^m$ is a set pair system such that $|A_i| \le a$ and $|B_i| \le b$ for $1 \le i \le m$, and $A_i \cap B_j \ne \emptyset$ if and only if $i \ne j$, then $m \le {a+b \choose…

We show that for any union-closed family $\mathcal{F} \subseteq 2^{[n]}, \mathcal{F} \neq \{\emptyset\}$, there exists an $i \in [n]$ which is contained in a $0.01$ fraction of the sets in $\mathcal{F}$. This is the first known constant…

We demonstrate the truth of the sunflower conjecture by showing that a family $\mathcal{F}$ of sets each of cardinality at most $m$ includes a $k$-sunflower, if $|\mathcal{F}| > ( c k )^{2m}$ for a constant $c>0$ independent of $m$ and $k$,…

We address a special case of a conjecture of M. Talagrand relating two notions of "threshold" for an increasing family $\mathcal F$ of subsets of a finite set $V$. The full conjecture implies equivalence of the "Fractional…

A sunflower with $r$ petals is a collection of $r$ sets so that the intersection of each pair is equal to the intersection of all of them. Erd\H{o}s and Rado proved the sunflower lemma: for any fixed $r$, any family of sets of size $w$,…

The Twin Prime conjecture states that there are infinitely many pairs of distinct primes which differ by $2$. Until recently this conjecture had seemed to be far out of reach with current techniques. However, in April 2013, Yitang Zhang…

A strong version of Andrica's conjecture can be formulated as follows: Except for $p_n\in\{3,7,13,23,31,113\}$, that is $n\in\{2,4,6,9,11,30\}$, one has$\sqrt{p_{n+1}}-\sqrt{p_n} < \frac{1}{2}.$ While a proof is far out of reach I shall…

Let $\mathcal{A}_1,\ldots,\mathcal{A}_m$ be families of $k$-subsets of an $n$-set. Suppose that one cannot choose pairwise disjoint edges from $s+1$ distinct families. Subject to this condition we investigate the maximum of…

A graph is diameter-2-critical if its diameter is 2 but the removal of any edge increases the diameter. A well-studied conjecture, known as the Murty-Simon conjecture, states that any diameter-2-critical graph of order n has at most…

The McCarty Conjecture states that any McCarty Matrix (an $n\times n$ matrix $A$ with positive integer entries and each of the $2n$ row and column sums equal to $n$), can be additively decomposed into two other matrices, $B$ and $C$, such…

In 1993 Stanley showed that if a simplicial complex is acyclic over some field, then its face poset can be decomposed into disjoint rank $1$ boolean intervals whose minimal faces together form a subcomplex. Stanley further conjectured that…

The union-closed sets conjecture (Frankl's conjecture) says that for any finite union-closed family of finite sets, other than the family consisting only of the empty set, there exists an element that belongs to at least half of the sets in…

We present a natural reverse Minkowski-type inequality for lattices, which gives upper bounds on the number of lattice points in a Euclidean ball in terms of sublattice determinants, and conjecture its optimal form. The conjecture exhibits…

We conjecture that if a system S \subseteq {x_i=1, x_i+x_j=x_k, x_i \cdot x_j=x_k: i,j,k \in {1,...,n}} has only finitely many solutions in integers x_1,...,x_n, then each such solution (x_1,...,x_n) satisfies |x_1|,...,|x_n| \leq…