On the size of dissociated bases (Q540128)

Summary: We prove that the sizes of the maximal dissociated subsets of a given finite subset of an abelian group differ by a logarithmic factor at most. On the other hand, we show that the set \(\{0, 1\}^n \subseteq \mathbb Z^n\) possesses a dissociated subset of size \(\Omega (n \log n)\); since the standard basis of \(\mathbb Z^n\) is a maximal dissociated subset of \(\{0, 1\}^n\) of size \(n\), the result just mentioned is essentially sharp.