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Intersecting families are essentially contained in juntas. (English) Zbl 1243.05235
Summary: A family $$\mathcal J$$ of subsets of $$\{1,\dots , n\}$$ is called a $$j$$-junta if there exists $$J \subseteq \{1, \dots, n\}$$, with $$|J| = j$$, such that the membership of a set $$S$$ in $$\mathcal J$$ depends only on $$S \cap J$$.
In this paper we provide a simple description of intersecting families of sets. Let $$n$$ and $$k$$ be positive integers with $$k < n/2$$, and let $$\mathcal A$$ be a family of pairwise intersecting subsets of $$\{1, \dots, n\}$$, all of size $$k$$. We show that such a family is essentially contained in a $$j$$-junta $$\mathcal J$$, where $$j$$ does not depend on $$n$$ but only on the ratio $$k/n$$ and on the interpretation of ‘essentially’.
When $$k = o(n)$$ we prove that every intersecting family of $$k$$-sets is almost contained in a dictatorship, a 1-junta (which by the Erdős-Ko-Rado theorem is a maximal intersecting family): for any such intersecting family $$\mathcal A$$ there exists an element $$i \in \{1, \dots, n\}$$ such that the number of sets in $$\mathcal A$$ that do not contain $$i$$ is of order $$\binom{n-2}{k-2}$$ (which is approximately $$\frac {k}{n-k}$$ times the size of a maximal intersecting family).
Our methods combine traditional combinatorics with results stemming from the theory of Boolean functions and discrete Fourier analysis.

##### MSC:
 05D05 Extremal set theory 05A18 Partitions of sets 05B99 Designs and configurations
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