A sharp bound on the number of maximal sum-free sets

József Balogh, Hong Liu, Maryam Sharifzadeh, Andrew Treglown

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Cameron and Erdős asked whether the number of maximal sum-free sets in {1,..., n} is much smaller than the number of sum-free sets. In the same paper they gave a lower bound of 2⌊n/4⌋ for the number of maximal sum-free sets. We prove the following: For each 1≤i≤4, there is a constant Ci such that, given any n≡i mod 4, {1,..., n} contains (Ci+o(1))2n/4 maximal sum-free sets. Our proof makes use of container and removal lemmas of Green, a structural result of Deshouillers, Freiman, Sós and Temkin and a recent bound on the number of subsets of integers with small sumset by Green and Morris.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)57-64
Number of pages8
JournalElectronic Notes in Discrete Mathematics
Volume49
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 2015

Keywords

  • Container method
  • Independent sets
  • Sum-free sets

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Discrete Mathematics and Combinatorics
  • Applied Mathematics

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