An improved sunflower bound.

A sunflower with r petals is a collection of r sets so that the intersection of each pair is equal to the intersection of all. Erdos and Rado in 1960 proved the sunflower lemma: for any fixed r, any family of sets of size w, with at least about ww sets, must contain a sunflower. The famous sunflower conjecture is that the bound on the number of sets can be improved to cw for some constant c. Despite much research, the best bounds until recently were all of the order of wcw for some constant c. In this work, we improve the bounds to about (logw)w.

Joint work with Ryan Alweiss, Shachar Lovett and Kewen Wu.

Date

Speakers

Jiapeng Zhang

Affiliation

Harvard University