Let $(\mathcal{P},\leqslant)$ be a finite poset. Define the numbers $a_1,a_2,\ldots$ (respectively, $c_1,c_2,\ldots$) so that $a_1+\ldots+a_k$ (respectively, $c_1+\ldots+c_k$) is the maximal number of elements of $\mathcal{P}$ which may be covered by $k$ antichains (respectively, $k$ chains.) Then the number $e(\mathcal{P})$ of linear extensions of poset $\mathcal{P}$ is not less than $\prod a_i!$ and not more than $n!/\prod c_i!$. A corollary: if $\mathcal{P}$ is partitioned onto disjoint antichains of size $b_1,b_2, \ldots$, then $e(\mathcal{P})\geqslant \prod b_i!$.
The chain covering number $\Cov(P)$ of a poset $P$ is the least number of chains needed to cover $P$. For a cardinal $ν$, we give a list of posets of cardinality and covering number $ν$ such that for every poset $P$ with no infinite antichain, $\Cov(P)\geq ν$ if and only if $P$ embeds a member of the list. This list has two elements if $ν$ is a successor cardinal, namely $[ν]^2$ and its dual, and four elements if $ν$ is a limit cardinal with $\cf(ν)$ weakly compact. For $ν= \aleph_1$, a list was given by the first author; his construction was extended by F. Dorais to every infinite successor c…
We present two results on maximal antichains in the strict chain product poset $[t_1+1]\times[t_2+1]\times\ldots\times[t_n+1]$. First, we prove that these maximal antichains are also maximum. Second, we prove that there is a bijection between maximal antichains in the strict chain product poset $[t_1+1]\times[t_2+1]\times\ldots\times[t_n+1]$ and antichains in the non-strict chain product poset $[t_1]\times[t_2]\times\ldots\times[t_n]$.
We prove that there are arbitrarily large indecomposable ordered sets T with a 2-chain C such that the smallest indecomposable proper superset U of C in T is T itself. Subsequently, we characterize all such indecomposable ordered sets T and 2-chains C. We also prove the same type of result for 2-antichains.
A proper merging of two disjoint quasi-ordered sets $P$ and $Q$ is a quasi-order on the union of $P$ and $Q$ such that the restriction to $P$ and $Q$ yields the original quasi-order again and such that no elements of $P$ and $Q$ are identified. In this article, we consider the cases where $P$ and $Q$ are chains, where $P$ and $Q$ are antichains, and where $P$ is an antichain and $Q$ is a chain. We give formulas that determine the number of proper mergings in all three cases, and introduce two new bijections from proper mergings of two chains to plane partitions and from proper mergings of an a…
We give a necessary and sufficient condition for a $P_4$-free graph to be a cograph. This allows us to obtain a simple proof of the fact that finite $P_4$-free graphs are finite cographs. We also prove that $N$-free chain complete posets and $N$-free posets with no infinite antichains are series-parallel. As a consequence, we obtain that every $N$-free poset with no infinite antichain has a chain and a partition into antichains so that each part intersects the chain. This answers a conjecture of Aharoni and Korman (Order \textbf{9} (1992) 245--253) in this case.
Motivated by the paper of Axenovich and Walzer [2], we study the Ramsey-type problems on the Boolean lattices. Given posets $P$ and $Q$, we look for the smallest Boolean lattice $\mathcal{B}_N$ such that any coloring on elements of $\mathcal{B}_N$ must contain a monochromatic $P$ or a rainbow $Q$. This number $N$ is called the Boolean rainbow Ramsey number of $P$ and $Q$ in the paper. Particularly, we determine the exact values of the Boolean rainbow Ramsey number for $P$ and $Q$ being the antichains, the Boolean posets, or the chains. From these results, we also give some general upper and lo…
A subset $A$ of a semigroup $S$ is called a $chain$ ($antichain$) if $xy\in\{x,y\}$ ($xy\notin\{x,y\}$) for any (distinct) elements $x,y\in S$. A semigroup $S$ is called ($anti$)$chain$-$finite$ if $S$ contains no infinite (anti)chains. We prove that each antichain-finite semigroup $S$ is periodic and for every idempotent $e$ of $S$ the set $\sqrt[\infty]{e}=\{x\in S:\exists n\in\mathbb N\;\;(x^n=e)\}$ is finite. This property of antichain-finite semigroups is used to prove that a semigroup is finite if and only if it is chain-finite and antichain-finite. Also we present an example of an antic…
Answering several questions of Duffus, Frankl and Rödl, we give asymptotics for the logarithms of (i) the number of maximal antichains in the n-dimensional Boolean algebra and (ii) the numbers of maximal independent sets in the covering graph of the n-dimensional hypercube and certain natural subgraphs thereof. The results in (ii) are implied by more general upper bounds on the numbers of maximal independent sets in regular and biregular graphs. We also mention some stronger possibilities involving actual rather than logarithmic asymptotics.
The structure of interval orders with no infinite antichain
Univ. Lyon, Université Claude-Bernard Lyon1（里昂大学，克洛德·贝尔纳里昂第一大学）；Institut Camille Jordan（卡米尔·乔丹研究所）；Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Calgary（卡尔加里大学数学与统计系）；Department of Mathematics & Computer Science, Royal Military College（皇家军事学院数学与计算机科学系）
Aharoni and Korman (Order 9 (1992) 245--253) have conjectured that every ordered set without infinite antichains possesses a chain and a partition into antichains so that each part intersects the chain. The conjecture is verified for posets whose incomparability graph is locally finite. It follows that the conjecture is true for $(3 + 1)$-free posets with no infinite antichains.
In this paper, we analyze the toggle group on the set of antichains of a poset. Toggle groups, generated by simple involutions, were first introduced by Cameron and Fon-Der-Flaass for order ideals of posets. Recently Striker has motivated the study of toggle groups on general families of subsets, including antichains. This paper expands on this work by examining the relationship between the toggle groups of antichains and order ideals, constructing an explicit isomorphism between the two groups. We also focus on the rowmotion action that has been well-studied in dynamical algebraic combinatori…
Meshalkin's theorem states that a class of ordered p-partitions of an n-set has at most $\max \binom{n}{a_1,...,a_p}$ members if for each k the k'th parts form an antichain. We give a new proof of this and the corresponding LYM inequality due to Hochberg and Hirsch, which is simpler and more general than previous proofs. It extends to a common generalization of Meshalkin's theorem and Erdos's theorem about r-chain-free set families.
An \emph{$n$-cube antichain} is a subset of the unit $n$-cube $[0,1]^n$ that does not contain two elements $\mathbf{x}=(x_1, x_2,\ldots, x_n)$ and $\mathbf{y}=(y_1, y_2,\ldots, y_n)$ satisfying $x_i\le y_i$ for all $i\in \{1,\ldots,n\}$. Using a chain partition of an adequate finite poset we show that the Hausdorff dimension of an $n$-cube antichain is at most $n-1$.We conjecture that the $(n-1)$-dimensional Hausdorff measure of an $n$-cube antichain is at most $n$ times the Hausdorff measure of a facet of the unit $n$-cube and we verify this conjecture for $n=2$ as well as under the assumptio…
A \emph{chain} in the unit $n$-cube is a set $C\subset [0,1]^n$ such that for every $\mathbf{x}=(x_1,\ldots,x_n)$ and $\mathbf{y}=(y_1,\ldots,y_n)$ in $C$ we either have $x_i\le y_i$ for all $i\in [n]$, or $x_i\ge y_i$ for all $i\in [n]$. We consider subsets, $A$, of the unit $n$-cube $[0,1]^n$ that satisfy \[ \text{card}(A \cap C) \le k, \, \text{ for all chains } \, C \subset [0,1]^n \, , \] where $k$ is a fixed positive integer. We refer to such a set $A$ as a $k$-antichain. We show that the $(n-1)$-dimensional Hausdorff measure of a $k$-antichain in $[0,1]^n$ is at most $kn$ and that the b…
This paper gives a formula for the antichain generating polynomial $\mathcal{N}_{[k]\times Q}$ of the poset $[k]\times Q$, where $[k]$ is an arbitrary chain and $Q$ is any finite graded poset. When $Q$ specializes to be a connected minuscule poet, which was classified by Proctor in 1984, we find that the polynomial $\mathcal{N}_{[k]\times Q}$ bears nice properties. For instance, we will recover the $B_n$-Narayana polynomial and the $D_{2n+2}$-Narayana polynomial. We collect evidence for the conjecture that whenever $\mathcal{N}_{[k]\times P}(x)$ is palindromic, it must be $γ$-positive. Moreove…
A partition of a finite poset into chains places a natural upper bound on the size of a union of k antichains. A chain partition is k-saturated if this bound is achieved. Greene and Kleitman proved that, for each k, every finite poset has a simultaneously k- and k+1-saturated chain partition. West showed that the Greene-Kleitman Theorem is best-possible in a strong sense by exhibiting, for each c \ge 4, a poset with longest chain of cardinality c and no k- and l-saturated chain partition for any distinct, nonconsecutive k,l < c. We call such posets polyunsaturated. We give necessary and suffic…
A proper merging of two disjoint quasi-ordered sets $P$ and $Q$ is a quasi-order on the union of $P$ and $Q$ such that the restriction to $P$ or $Q$ yields the original quasi-order again and such that no elements of $P$ and $Q$ are identified. In this article, we determine the number of proper mergings in the case where $P$ is a star (i.e. an antichain with a smallest element adjoined), and $Q$ is a chain. We show that the lattice of proper mergings of an $m$-antichain and an $n$-chain, previously investigated by the author, is a quotient lattice of the lattice of proper mergings of an $m$-sta…
Let $Δ$ be a (connected) Dynkin diagram of rank $n\ge 2$ and $Φ_+ = Φ_+(Δ)$ the corresponding root poset (it consists of all positive roots with respect to a fixed root basis). The width of $Φ_+$ is $n$. We will show that $Φ_+$ is "conical": it is the disjoint union of $n$ solid chains. The rich antichains in $Φ_+$ are the antichains of cardinality $n-1$. It is well known that the number of rich antichains is equal to the cardinality of $Φ_+$. The set $\mathcal R(Δ)$ of rich antichains in $Φ_+$ can itself be considered as a poset which is quite similar, but not always isomorphic, to $Φ_+$. We …
We consider 'supersaturation' problems in partially ordered sets (posets) of the following form. Given a finite poset $P$ and an integer $m$ greater than the cardinality of the largest antichain in $P$, what is the minimum number of comparable pairs in a subset of $P$ of cardinality $m$? We provide a framework for obtaining lower bounds on this quantity based on counting comparable pairs relative to a random chain and apply this framework to obtain supersaturation results for three classical posets: the boolean lattice, the collection of subspaces of $\mathbb{F}_q^n$ ordered by set inclusion a…
Sperner's bound on the size of an antichain in the lattice P(S) of subsets of a finite set S has been generalized in three different directions: by Erdos to subsets of P(S) in which chains contain at most r elements; by Meshalkin to certain classes of compositions of S; by Griggs, Stahl, and Trotter through replacing the antichains by certain sets of pairs of disjoint elements of P(S). We unify Erdos's, Meshalkin's, and Griggs-Stahl-Trotter's inequalities with a common generalization. We similarly unify their accompanying LYM inequalities. Our bounds do not in general appear to be the best pos…
We introduce two polynomials (in $q$) associated with a finite poset $P$ that encode some information on the covering relation in $P$. If $P$ is a distributive lattice, and hence $P$ is isomorphic to the poset of dual order ideals in a poset $L$, then these polynomials coincide and the coefficient of $q$ equals the number of $k$-element antichains in $L$. In general, these two covering polynomials are different, and we introduce a deviation polynomial of $P$, which measures the difference between these two. We then compute all these polynomials in the case, where $P$ is one of the posets assoc…
We define several sorts of mappings on a poset like monotone, strictly monotone, upper cone preserving and variants of these. Our aim is to characterize posets in which some of these mappings coincide. We define special mappings determined by two elements and investigate when these are strictly monotone or upper cone preserving. If the considered poset is a semilattice then its monotone mappings coincide with semilattice homomorphisms if and only if the poset is a chain. Similarly, we study posets which need not be semilattices but whose upper cones have a minimal element. We extend this inves…
Many invertible actions $τ$ on a set ${\mathcal{S}}$ of combinatorial objects, along with a natural statistic $f$ on ${\mathcal{S}}$, exhibit the following property which we dub \textbf{homomesy}: the average of $f$ over each $τ$-orbit in ${\mathcal{S}}$ is the same as the average of $f$ over the whole set ${\mathcal{S}}$. This phenomenon was first noticed by Panyushev in 2007 in the context of the rowmotion action on the set of antichains of a root poset; Armstrong, Stump, and Thomas proved Panyushev's conjecture in 2011. We describe a theoretical framework for results of this kind that appli…
The closure of the convex cone generated by all flag $f$-vectors of graded posets is shown to be polyhedral. In particular, we give the facet inequalities to the polar cone of all nonnegative chain-enumeration functionals on this class of posets. These are in one-to-one correspondence with antichains of intervals on the set of ranks and thus are counted by Catalan numbers. Furthermore, we prove that the convolution operation introduced by Kalai assigns extreme rays to pairs of extreme rays in most cases. We describe the strongest possible inequalities for graded posets of rank at most 5.
Birational rowmotion is an action on the space of assignments of rational functions to the elements of a finite partially-ordered set (poset). It is lifted from the well-studied rowmotion map on order ideals (equivariantly on antichains) of a poset $P$, which when iterated on special posets, has unexpectedly nice properties in terms of periodicity, cyclic sieving, and homomesy (statistics whose averages over each orbit are constant) [AST11, BW74, CF95, Pan09, PR13, RuSh12,RuWa15+,SW12, ThWi17, Yil17. In this context, rowmotion appears to be related to Auslander-Reiten translation on certain qu…
A coloured version of classic extremal problems dates back to Erdős and Rothschild, who in 1974 asked which $n$-vertex graph has the maximum number of 2-edge-colourings without monochromatic triangles. They conjectured that the answer is simply given by the largest triangle-free graph. Since then, this new class of coloured extremal problems has been extensively studied by various researchers. In this paper we pursue the Erdős--Rothschild versions of Sperner's Theorem, the classic result in extremal set theory on the size of the largest antichain in the Boolean lattice, and Erdős' extension to…
In this paper, in the context of the ``Dessins d'enfants'' theory, we give a combinatorial criterion for a plane tree to cover a tree from the classes of "chains" or "stars''. Besides, we discuss some applications of this result which are related to the arithmetical theory of torsion on curves.
Eternal and m-eternal domination are concerned with using mobile guards to protect a graph against infinite sequences of attacks at vertices. Eternal domination allows one guard to move per attack, whereas more than one guard may move per attack in the m-eternal domination model. Inequality chains consisting of the domination, eternal domination, m-eternal domination, independence, and clique covering numbers of graph are explored in this paper. Among other results, we characterize bipartite and triangle-free graphs with domination and eternal domination numbers equal to two, trees with equal …
A poset has the non-messing-up property if it has two covering sets of disjoint saturated chains so that for any labeling of the poset, sorting the labels along one set of chains and then sorting the labels along the other set yields a linear extension of the poset. The linear extension yielded by thus twice sorting a labeled non-messing-up poset may be independent of which sort was performed first. Here we characterize such sort-invariant labelings for convex subposets of a cylinder. They are completely determined by avoidance of a particular subpattern: a diamond of four elements whose small…
We study three different poset structures on the set of all compositions. In the first case, the covering relation consists of inserting a part of size one to the left or to the right, or increasing the size of some part by one. The resulting poset was studied by the author in "A poset classifying non-commutative term orders", and then in "Standard paths in another composition poset" where some results about generating functions for standard paths in this poset was established. The latter article was inspired by the work of Bergeron, Bousquet-M{é}lou and Dulucq on "Standard paths in the compos…
It is consistent (relative to ZFC) that the union of max{b,g} many families in the Baire space which are not finitely dominating is not dominating. In particular, it is consistent that for each nonprincipal ultrafilter U, the cofinality of the reduced ultrapower w^w/U is greater than max{b,g}. The model is constructed by oracle chain condition forcing, to which we give a self-contained introduction.
