Sperner's theorem

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Sperner's theorem: Any line-free subset of [math]\displaystyle{ [2]^n }[/math] has cardinality at most [math]\displaystyle{ \binom{n}{\lfloor n/2\rfloor} }[/math].

It implies the k=2 version of the density Hales-Jewett theorem.

A stronger version of Sperner's theorem is

LYM inequality: Any line-free subset of [math]\displaystyle{ [2]^n }[/math] has equal-slices measure at most 1.

The k=3 generalisation of this inequality is the hyper-optimistic conjecture.

The LYM inequality can be proven as follows. Randomly shuffle the [math]\displaystyle{ n }[/math] indices and then consider the intersection of [math]\displaystyle{ A }[/math] with the strings [math]\displaystyle{ 0^i 1^{n-i} }[/math] for [math]\displaystyle{ i=0,\ldots,n }[/math]. As [math]\displaystyle{ A }[/math] is line-free, at most one of these strings lie in [math]\displaystyle{ A }[/math]. Averaging over all choice of shuffles we obtain the claim.

Sperner's theorem is also related to the Kruskal-Katona theorem.