On a problem of Kleitman and West (Q1182891)

A discrete isoperimetric problem closely related to Kruskal-Katona's does not have a nested family of solution sets. The combinatorial techniques do not work without that property. In this paper the K-W problem is simplified by stabilization and a continuous limit of the simplified problem is found and solved by variational methods. It is shown that a representative sample may be embedded in a variant of the continuous problem for which the same variational argument gives the exact solution.