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Rudolf Ahlswede ¢ Vladimir Blinovsky Lectures on Advances in Combinatorics Rudolf Ahlswede Vladimir Blinovsky Universitat¨ Bielefeld Institute of Information Fakultat¨ f¨urMathematik Transmission Problems Universitatsstr.¨ 25 Russian Academy of Sciences 33615 Bielefeld Bol’shoi karetnyi per. 19 Germany 127994 Moscow [email protected] Russia [email protected] ISBN 978-3-540-78601-6 e-ISBN 978-3-540-78602-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2008923540 Mathematics Subject Classification (2000): 05-XX, 11-XX, 40-XX, 52-XX, 68-XX, 94-XX °c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustra- tions, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilm or in any other way, and storage in data banks. Duplication of this publication or parts thereof is permitted only under the provisions of the German Copyright Law of September 9, 1965, in its current version, and permission for use must always be obtained from Springer. Violations are liable to prosecution under the German Copyright Law. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. Cover design: WMXDesign GmbH, Heidelberg Printed on acid-free paper 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 springer.com Preface The lectures concentrate on highlights in Combinatorial (Chapters II and III) and Number Theoretical (Chapter IV) Extremal Theory, in particular on the solution of famous problems which were open for many decades. However, the organization of the lectures in six chapters does neither follow the historic developments nor the connections between ideas in several cases. With the specified auxiliary results in Chapter I on Probability Theory, Graph Theory, etc., all chapters can be read and taught independently of one another. In addition to the 16 lectures organized in 6 chapters of the main part of the book, there is supplementary material for most of them in the Appendix. In particu- lar, there are applications and further exercises, research problems, conjectures, and even research programs. The following books and reports [B97], [ACDKPSWZ00], [A01], and [ABCABDM06], mostly of the authors, are frequently cited in this book, especially in the Appendix, and we therefore mark them by short labels as [B], [N], [E], and [G]. We emphasize that there are also “Exercises” in [B], a “Problem Section” with contributions by several authors on pages 1063–1105 of [G], which are often of a combinatorial nature, and “Problems and Conjectures” on pages 172–173 of [E]. The book includes the two well-known results (both in Chapter V), the Ahlswede/Zhang identity, which improves the LYM-inequality, and the Ahlswede/Daykin inequality, which is more general and also sharper than known correlation inequalities in Statistical Physics, Probability Theory, and Combi- natorics (cf. the survey by Fishburn/Shepp in [N], 501–516). These inequali- ties were started in Probability Theory (percolation) around 1960 with Harris, in Combinatorics in 1966 with Kleitman’s Lemma, and in physics 1971 with Fortuin/Kasteleyn/Ginibre (FKG). In many books the AD-inequality (also called “4-Function Theorem”) is viewed in connection with lattices. We emphasize that a much more general inequality of [AD79b] makes no reference to lattices. Its essence is a Cartesian product property of sets and therefore there is a wider range of possible applications. Also there is nothing holy about the number of operations and factors on either side of the inequality as long as proper weight- expansiveness is ensured. In the following, we come to another surprise concerning number-theoretical inequalities. v vi Preface A spectacular series of results started with a lecture in 1992 of Erdos,¨ who raised in 1962 (and repeatedly spoke about) the problem “What is the maximal cardinality of a set of numbers smaller than n with no k + 1 of its members being pairwise relatively prime?” This stimulated Ahlswede and Khachatrian to make a systematic investiga- tion of this and related number-theoretical extremal problems. Its immediate suc- cesses are solutions for several well-known conjectures of Erdos¨ and Erdos/Graham¨ (Chapter VI). More importantly, they gained an understanding for the role of the prime number distribution for such problems, which distinguishes them from com- binatorial extremal problems. These investigations had another surprising fruit. The AD-inequality implies a number-theoretical correlation inequality for Dirichlet den- sities of sets of numbers, which implies and is sharper than the classical inequalities in [H37] and [R37], which settled a conjecture of Hasse concerning an identity due to Dirichlet and Behrend, the number theoretical form of FKG! Number The- ory came first and AD is a crossroad between Pure and Applied Mathematics (in Chapter V). Also another inequality, seemingly without predecessors, was discov- ered. Finally, the analysis led to the discovery of a new “pushing” method with a wide applicability. In particular, it led to the solution of well-known combinator- ial problems like the famous 4m-conjecture (Erdos/Ko/Rado¨ 1938, one of the oldest problems in Combinatorial Extremal Theory) or the diametric problem in Hamming spaces (optimal anticodes). Actually, the 4m-conjecture just concerned the first unsolved case of the follow- A⊂ [n] ing much more general problem: A system of sets k is called t-intersecting if |A1 ∩ A2|≥t for all A1,A2 ∈A, and I(n,k,t) denotes the set of all such systems. Determine the function M(n,k,t)= max |A| and the structure of maximal sys- A∈I(n,k,t) tems! Ahlswede and Khachatrian gave the complete solution for every n,k,t.Ithas a very clear geometrical interpretation (Chapter II). Most lectures in Chapter III are devoted to combinatorics of multiple packings, which are equivalent to list codes in Information Theory and as such relevant for estimating error probabilities. Fundamental works of Blinovsky [B01a] represented here deliver the solutions of the problems for list codes, which were stated by the classics of information theory in the middle of the last century. These problems give a beautiful example of interplay between Extremal Combinatorics and Information Theory. Covering and packing are classical topics in Geometry. In Chapter III they concern sequence spaces for problems primarily motivated by Information Theory: Data Compression and Shannon’s zero error capacity problem of a noisy channel, which is a packing problem for product hypergraphs. A highlight was Lovasz’´ solu- tion of the pentagon case. In general, the progress is rather slow. Here we deal with a related partition problem. Origins of problems and theories, which developed with them, are only briefly discussed because of limited space. However, we consider it especially important for students to think about Mathematics in connection with other sciences and real world phenomena. In fact, a large part of Chapters IV and V originated that way. Stimuli came mostly from questions in Information Theory. We give a quote from [N], page xvi. Preface vii “The deep interplay between several disciplines and a broad philosophical view is a thread through Ahlswede’s work. For him, Information Theory deals with gain- ing information (that is, statistics), transfer of information without and with secrecy constraints (that is, cryptology), and storing information (Memories, Data Compres- sion). Applying ideas from one area to another often led to unexpected and beautiful results and even to new theories. Let us give an example involving storage. Motivated by the practical problem of storing data using a new laser technique, code models for reusable memories were introduced in Information Theory. It turned out that the analysis was much more efficient when stating the question as a combinatorial extremal problem, which led immediately to the connections with hypergraph coloring, novel iso-diametric problems in sequence spaces and finally to the new class of the so-called “Higher- level extremal problems” in Combinatorics. Among them are also Sperner-type questions for “clouds” of antichains. These problems are by one degree more complex than those usually considered: sets take the role of elements, families of sets (clouds) take the role of sets, etc. ([N], P.L. Erdos,¨ L.A. Szekely, 117–124). In another direction, generalizing models for reusable memories, Ahlswede and Zhang introduced write–efficient rewritable memories leading to diametrical prob- lems for sequence spaces. Imagine a tape with n cells into which we can write letters from an alphabet X . n Awordx =(x1,...,xn) stores some messages. When we want to update this record n to a message represented by y =(y1,...,yn) the per letter costs ϕ(xt ,yt ) add up to ϕ n n n ϕ n(x ,y )=∑t=1 (xt ,yt ). When there is a cost constraint D, then we require n n ϕn(x ,y ) ≤ D. To be able to update many messages we come to the diametric problem to charac- terize n n n n M(ϕn,D)=max{|C| : ϕn(x ,y ) ≤ D for all x ,y ∈ C} for the “sum-type” cost ϕn, which can also be a distance function like the Hamming, Taxi or Lee metric, etc. These problems are discussed also in Chapter II (and in the Appendix). There, in Lecture 6, also two families of sequences with constant mutual dis- tances are considered. This falls into the subject of monochromatic rectangles, which arose in Yao’s investigation of communication complexity. The topic of the last lecture in Chapter II also has its origin in Computer Science and was communicated to us by Mullin in 1990. Finally, we emphasize that another approach, the study of extremal problems under dimension constraints (in Chapter IV) has found an application in Computer Science.