Sunflowers in lattices (Q2583667)

This paper gives some generalizations of the Erdős sunflower lemma. A sunflower is a family of subsets so that the intersection of any two subsets is equal to the intersection of all subsets. The sunflower lemma says that if the family is \(k\)-uniform, and contains at least \(k!(t-1)^k\) subsets, then it contains a sunflower of size \(t\). The author generalizes the concept of sunflowers to any lattice, with meet replacing intersection. Then he gives generalizations in distributive lattices, graphic matroids, and matroids that are representable over a finite field. He also gives examples to show that it cannot be generalized further to all lattices or all matroids.