cp's OEIS Frontend

This is a front-end for the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, made by Christian Perfect. The idea is to provide OEIS entries in non-ancient HTML, and then to think about how they're presented visually. The source code is on GitHub.

A332077 Square array of sunflower numbers Sun(m,n) = minimal number of distinct sets of cardinality <= m such that there is a sunflower with at least n sets among them, read by falling antidiagonals; m, n >= 1.

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%I A332077 #42 Aug 31 2025 01:26:21
%S A332077 1,2,1,3,2,1,4,7,2,1,5,11,21,2,1,6,21
%N A332077 Square array of sunflower numbers Sun(m,n) = minimal number of distinct sets of cardinality <= m such that there is a sunflower with at least n sets among them, read by falling antidiagonals; m, n >= 1.
%C A332077 A sunflower S is a collection of sets such that all pairwise intersections of distinct A, B in S are equal. The intersection of all the sets is called the core or kernel of S.
%C A332077 Some authors (e.g., Wikipedia) use "more than" instead of "at least" in the definition, which corresponds to an index n decreased by 1. We use the same conventions Tao (but following OEIS standards we use m,n instead of k,r). Also, some authors (e.g., Abbott et al. and the Polymath wiki page) use f(k,r) = Sun(k,r) - 1 which is not the minimal number of required sets, but such that any collection of *more than* f(k,r) sets has the given property.
%C A332077 Bell et al. improve Rao's bound [as reproved by Tao] from Sun(m,n) <= O(n log(mn))^m for m, n >= 2 to the slightly cleaner bound Sun(m,n) <= O(n log m)^m for m, n >= 2. [Pers. comm. from L. Warnke.] - _M. F. Hasler_, May 02 2021
%H A332077 H. L. Abbott, D. Hanson, and N. Sauer, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/0097-3165(72)90103-3">Intersection Theorems for Systems of Sets</a>. J. Comb. Theory A 12 (1972) pp. 381-389. doi:10.1016/0097-3165(72)90103-3
%H A332077 T. Bell, C. Chueluecha and L. Warnke, <a href="http://doi.org/10.1016/j.disc.2021.112367">Note on Sunflowers</a>, Discrete Mathematics 344 (2021), 112340; DOI: 10.1016/j.disc.2021.112367; preprint arXiv:2009.09327.
%H A332077 P. Erdös and R. Rado, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1112/jlms/s1-35.1.85">Intersection Theorems for Systems of Sets</a>, Journal of the London Mathematical Society, s1-35 (1960) pp. 85-90. doi:10.1112/jlms/s1-35.1.85
%H A332077 Polymath wiki, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220705073934/https://asone.ai/polymath/index.php?title=The_Erdos-Rado_sunflower_lemma">The Erdos-Rado sunflower lemma</a>, as of Feb 5, 2016.
%H A332077 Anup Rao, <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.04774">Coding for Sunflowers</a>, arXiv:1909.04774 [math.CO], Sept. 2019.
%H A332077 Terence Tao, <a href="https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2020/07/20/the-sunflower-lemma-via-shannon-entropy">The sunflower lemma via Shannon entropy</a>, personal blog "What's new", Jul 20 2020.
%H A332077 Wikipedia, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunflower_(mathematics)">Sunflower (mathematics)</a>.
%H A332077 Kyle Wood, <a href="/A332077/a332077.txt">Example for Sun(3,3)=21, a family of 20 sets with no 3-flowers</a>.
%F A332077 Sun(m,n) = n for n <= 2 and all m;
%F A332077 Sun(1,n) = n for all n: see Examples for explanation.
%F A332077 Sun(2,n) = n(n-1)+1 if n is odd, (n-1)^2-n/2 if n is even. (Abbott-Hanson-Sauer)
%F A332077 (n-1)^m <= Sun(m,n) <= (n-1)^m*m! + 1. (Erdös & Rado)
%F A332077 Sun(m,n) <= O(n log(mn))^m for m, n >= 2. (Rao)
%F A332077 Sun(m,n) <= O(n log m)^m for m, n >= 2. (Bell-Chueluecha-Warnke)
%F A332077 Sunflower conjecture: Sun(m,n) <= (n*O(1))^m.
%e A332077 The table starts:
%e A332077    m \n=1   2   3   4   5   6   7  ...
%e A332077   ---+-------------------------------
%e A332077    1 |  1   2   3   4   5   6   7  ...
%e A332077    2 |  1   2   7  11  21  28  43  ...
%e A332077    3 |  1   2  21  ...
%e A332077    4 |  1   2  ...
%e A332077    5 |  1   2  ...
%e A332077     ...
%e A332077 Row m=1 has Sun(1,n) = n for all n, because any collection of n sets having at most 1 element (which may or may not include the empty set) makes up an n-petal sunflower S with an empty kernel.
%e A332077 Columns n=1 and n=2 have Sun(m,n) = n for any m, because any single set A makes up a 1-petal sunflower S = {A}, and any two distinct sets A, B make up a 2-petal sunflower S = {A, B} with kernel {A intersect B}, necessarily not equal to both A and B since they are distinct; then so the petals with at least one of them nonempty.
%Y A332077 Cf. A236397, A266696.
%K A332077 nonn,tabl,hard,more,nice,changed
%O A332077 1,2
%A A332077 _M. F. Hasler_, Jul 27 2020