Best possible bounds on the number of distinct differences in intersecting families
Abstract
For a family $\mathcal F$, let $\mathcal D(\mathcal F)$ stand for the family of all sets that can be expressed as $F\setminus G$, where $F,G\in \mathcal F$. A family $\mathcal F$ is intersecting if any two sets from the family have non-empty intersection. In this paper, we study the following question: what is the maximum of $|\mathcal D(\mathcal F)|$ for an intersecting family of $k$-element sets? Frankl conjectured that the maximum is attained when $\mathcal F$ is the family of all sets containing a fixed element. We show that this holds if $n \ge 50k\ln k$ and $k \ge 50$. At the same time, we provide a counterexample for $n< 4k$.
- Publication:
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arXiv e-prints
- Pub Date:
- June 2021
- arXiv:
- arXiv:2106.05355
- Bibcode:
- 2021arXiv210605355F
- Keywords:
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- Mathematics - Combinatorics;
- Computer Science - Discrete Mathematics