Tuesday, December 16, 2008

2 theorems

In combinatorics, the Erdős–Ko–Rado theorem of Paul Erdős, Chao Ko, and Richard Rado is a theorem on hypergraphs, specifically, on uniform hypergraphs of rank r.

The theorem is as follows. If n\geq2r, and A is a family of distinct subsets of {1,2,...,n}, such that each subset is of size r (thus making A a uniform hypergraph of rank r), and each pair of subsets intersects, then the maximum number of sets that can be in A is given by the binomial coefficient

{n-1} \choose {r-1}.
Baranyai's Theorem

If k|n, then the complete k-uniform hypergraph on n vertices decomposes into 1-factors, where a 1-factor is a set of n/k pairwise disjoint k-sets. Brouwer and Schrijver (1979) give a beautiful proof using the maximum flow, minimum cut theorem of network flows.

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