How to drive our families mad

Publication date: 24 November 2006

Abstract: Given a family

F

of pairwise almost disjoint sets on a countable set

S

, we study maximal almost disjoint (mad) families

F^{+}

extending

F

. We define

a^{+} (F)

to be the minimal possible cardinality of

F^{+} s e t m i n u s F

for such

F^{+}

, and

a^{+} (k a p p a) = s u p a^{+} (F) : | F | l e q k a p p a

. We show that all infinite cardinal less than or equal to the continuum continuum can be represented as

a^{+} (F)

for some almost disjoint

F

and that the inequalities

a l e p h_{1} = a < a^{+} (a l e p h_{1}) = c

and

a = a^{+} (a l e p h_{1}) < c

are both consistent. We also give a several constructions of mad families with some additional properties.

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