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added a top-level tag; https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/1457/why-are-mo-tags-formatted-as-they-are
Martin Sleziak
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The maximal size of intersection of two sets

Let $S=\{1,2,\cdots,2n\}$, and $S_i \subseteq S(i=1,2,\cdots,n+1)$ be $n+1$ subsets, each of which contains half of the $2n$ elements, namely $|S_i|=n$. Consider the following expression: $$M=\max_{1\le i<j \le n+1} |S_i \cap S_j|$$

  1. When $n$ is even, it seems that $M\ge n/2$ for any choice of $S_i$. I think it is a really interesting phenomenon, but how does one give a proof of this.

  2. Also by experiment, I find that$\{(i,j):1\le i<j \le n+1,|S_i \cap S_j|\ge n/2\}$ is $\Omega(n)$, not only one pair.

  3. This question can be generalized to the following one: Let $S=\{1,2,\cdots,n\}$, and $S_i \subseteq S$ be $m$ subsets of $S$, each of which contains exactly $k$ elements. Can the maximal size of $|S_i \cap S_j|(1\le i<j \le m)$ be bounded from below?

  4. This question can be changed to a real version. Consider $x_i \in [0,1]^n$ be $m$ vectors, each of which has a fixed norm: $\| {x_i}\|_2=k$. Can the maximal inner product of $x_i \cdot x_j(1\le i<j \le m)$ be bounded from below?

Maybe the third and fourth question are hard, but if they can be solved, I think the results will be very useful. Also, the correctness of the first two questions have been checked for a few instances.

zbh2047
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