English

A short note on supersaturation for oddtown and eventown

Combinatorics 2022-11-03 v2

Abstract

Given a collection A\mathcal{A} of subsets of an nn element set, let op(A)\text{op}(\mathcal{A}) denote the number of distinct pairs A,BAA,B \in \mathcal{A} for which AB|A \cap B| is odd. For s{1,2}s \in \{1,2\}, we prove op(A)s2n/21\text{op}(\mathcal{A}) \geq s \cdot 2^{\lfloor n/2 \rfloor-1} for any collection A\mathcal{A} of 2n/2+s2^{\lfloor n/2 \rfloor}+s even-sized subsets of an nn element set. We also prove op(A)3\text{op}(\mathcal{A}) \geq 3 for any collection A\mathcal{A} of n+1n+1 odd-sized subsets of an nn element set that. Moreover, we show that both of these results are best possible. We then consider larger collections of odd-sized and even-sized sets respectively and explore the connection to minimizing the number of pairwise intersections of size exactly k2k-2 amongst collections of size kk subsets from an nn element set.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2109.09925,
  title  = {A short note on supersaturation for oddtown and eventown},
  author = {Jason O'Neill},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.09925},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

some typos fixed and new remarks on corresponding problem for forbidden intersection problem

R2 v1 2026-06-24T06:09:59.837Z