Sperner Theory

Download or read book Sperner Theory written by Konrad Engel and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-01-28 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The starting point of this book is Sperner's theorem, which answers the question: What is the maximum possible size of a family of pairwise (with respect to inclusion) subsets of a finite set? This theorem stimulated the development of a fast growing theory dealing with external problems on finite sets and, more generally, on finite partially ordered sets. This book presents Sperner theory from a unified point of view, bringing combinatorial techniques together with methods from programming, linear algebra, Lie-algebra representations and eigenvalue methods, probability theory, and enumerative combinatorics. Researchers and graduate students in discrete mathematics, optimisation, algebra, probability theory, number theory, and geometry will find many powerful new methods arising from Sperner theory.