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Antichain: 3 Join and Meet Operations

The document defines and describes antichains, which are subsets of a partially ordered set where any two elements are incomparable. It discusses the height and width of partially ordered sets as related to antichains. It also describes join and meet operations that can be performed on antichains and how these operations form a distributive lattice. Finally, it mentions related concepts like Sperner families and Dedekind numbers.

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90 views3 pages

Antichain: 3 Join and Meet Operations

The document defines and describes antichains, which are subsets of a partially ordered set where any two elements are incomparable. It discusses the height and width of partially ordered sets as related to antichains. It also describes join and meet operations that can be performed on antichains and how these operations form a distributive lattice. Finally, it mentions related concepts like Sperner families and Dedekind numbers.

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mars
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Antichain

In mathematics, in the area of order theory, an antichain 2, 3, 6, 20, 168, 7581,


is a subset of a partially ordered set such that any two el- 7828354, 2414682040998,
ements in the subset are incomparable. (Some authors 56130437228687557907788 (sequence
use the term antichain to mean strong antichain, a sub- A000372 in the OEIS).
set such that there is no element of the poset smaller than
two distinct elements of the antichain.) Even the empty set has two antichains in its power set:
Let S be a partially ordered set. We say two elements a one containing a single set (the empty set itself) and one
and b of a partially ordered set are comparable if a containing no sets.
b or b a. If two elements are not comparable, we say
they are incomparable; that is, x and y are incomparable
if neither x y nor y x. 3 Join and meet operations
A chain in S is a subset C of S in which each pair of
elements is comparable; that is, C is totally ordered. An Any antichain A corresponds to a lower set
antichain in S is a subset A of S in which each pair of dif-
ferent elements is incomparable; that is, there is no order
relation between any two dierent elements in A.
LA = {x | y A s.t. x y}.

In a nite partial order (or more generally a partial order


1 Height and width satisfying the ascending chain condition) all lower sets
have this form. The union of any two lower sets is an-
A maximal antichain is an antichain that is not a proper other lower set, and the union operation corresponds in
subset of any other antichain. A maximum antichain this way to a join operation on antichains:
is an antichain that has cardinality at least as large as
every other antichain. The width of a partially ordered
set is the cardinality of a maximum antichain. Any an- A B = {x A B | y A B s.t. x < y}.
tichain can intersect any chain in at most one element,
so, if we can partition the elements of an order into k Similarly, we can dene a meet operation on antichains,
chains then the width of the order must be at most k (if corresponding to the intersection of lower sets:
the antichain has more than k elements, by the Pigeon-
hole Principle, there would be 2 of its elements belong-
ing to the same chain, contradiction). Dilworths theorem A B = {x L L | y L L s.t. x < y}.
A B A B
states that this bound can always be reached: there always
exists an antichain, and a partition of the elements into The join and meet operations on all nite antichains of
chains, such that the number of chains equals the number nite subsets of a set X dene a distributive lattice, the
of elements in the antichain, which must therefore also free distributive lattice generated by X. Birkhos repre-
equal the width. Similarly, we can dene the height of a sentation theorem for distributive lattices states that every
partial order to be the maximum cardinality of a chain. nite distributive lattice can be represented via join and
Mirskys theorem states similarly that in any partial order meet operations on antichains of a nite partial order, or
of nite height, the height equals the smallest number of equivalently as union and intersection operations on the
antichains into which the order may be partitioned. lower sets of the partial order.

2 Sperner families 4 See also


An antichain in the inclusion ordering of subsets of an n- Dedekind number, the number of antichains in the
element set is known as a Sperner family. The number power set of a nite set
of dierent Sperner families is counted by the Dedekind
numbers, the rst few of which numbers are Strong antichain

1
2 5 REFERENCES

5 References
Weisstein, Eric W. Antichain. MathWorld.

Antichain. PlanetMath.
3

6 Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses


6.1 Text
Antichain Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antichain?oldid=708589594 Contributors: Patrick, Michael Hardy, Docu, Charles
Matthews, David.Monniaux, Iwehrman, Giftlite, Markus Krtzsch, DefLog~enwiki, Mairi, Remuel, 3mta3, Linas, Rocastelo, R.e.b.,
Bubba73, Mathbot, YurikBot, Trovatore, RobertBorgersen, Chlewbot, Mhym, Dreadstar, Thijs!bot, JAnDbot, David Eppstein, Lantonov,
Saibod, YohanN7, Mahue, BOTarate, Addbot, Ptbotgourou, ArthurBot, LilHelpa, EmausBot and Anonymous: 7

6.2 Images

6.3 Content license


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