CARMA-GTA DISCRETE MATHEMATICS SEMINAR Speaker: Ian Roberts, Charles Darwin University Title: The interplay of Extremal set theory and combinatorial designs Location: Room V129, Mathematics Building (Callaghan Campus) The University of Newcastle Time and Date: 3:30 pm, Tue, 28th Jun 2011 Abstract: The talk will focus on recent results or work in progress, with some open problems which span both Combinatorial Design and Sperner Theory. The work focuses upon the duality between antichains and completely separating systems. An antichain is a collection $\cal A$ of subsets of $[n]=\{1,...,n\}$ such that for any distinct $A,B\in\cal A$, $A$ is not a subset of $B$. A $k$-regular antichain on $[m]$ is an antichain in which each element of $[m]$ occurs exactly $k$ times. A CSS is the dual of an antichain. An $(n,k)CSS \cal C$ is a collection of blocks of size $k$ on $[n]$, such that for each distinct $a,b\in [n]$ there are sets $A,B \in \cal C$ with $a \in A-B$ and $b \in B-A$. The notions of $k$-regular antichains of size $n$ on $[m]$ and $(n,k)CSS$s in $m$ blocks are dual concepts. Natural questions to be considered include: Does a $k$-regular antichain of size $n$ exist on $[m]$? For \$k [Permanent link]