Extremal Combinatorics 2018

Lecturer

Istvan Tomon

If you have any questions, feel free to send an e-mail or come by my office.

Course details

Lecture: Thursday –  14.15-16.00 – MA A1 12

Course page

After every lecture,  the lecture notes will be uploaded to this page. Each lecture note will contain a certain amont of exercise problems, some of them are starred. To pass this course, you need to hand in the *correct* solution of 3 starred problems. The other exercise problems are optional and can be used to test your understanding of the current material.

Moreover, I intend to highlight certain open problems in each of these lecture notes, which can be the subject of genuine research.

The course is open for Master students as well. There are no prerequisites for the course, but familiarity with combinatorics and graph theory is appreciated.

Lecture Notes

Lecture note 1 – Sperner’s theorem and the Littlewood-Offord problem

Lecture note 2 – Isoperimetric inequalities

Lecture note 3 – Intersecting families

Lecture note 4 – Influence of variables

Lecture note 5 – Sharp thresholds

Lecture note 6 – Frankl-Wilson theorem

Lecture note 7 – Grolmusz’s construction on the Frankl-Wilson theorem

Lecture note 8 – VC-dimension

Lecture note 9 – Epsilon-nets

Lecture note 10 – Spectral method for intersecting families

Lecture note 11 – Two classical results in extremal set theory 

For more details on the discrete Fourier transform, see the wonderful note of Ronald de Wolf.

Announcement

There will be no class on the 10th of May due to it being a bank holiday. Also, I will not be here on the 17th and 24th of May either, so the class is canceled on these dates.

On the 31st of May, the class will be held, as usual.