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Mathematicians Begin to Tame Wild

‘Sunflower’ Problem
6 A major advance toward solving the 60-year-old sun ower conjecture is
shedding light on how order begins to appear as random systems grow in
size.

How do mathematical sun owers emerge from random data? HelloRF Zcool

A
team of mathematicians and computer scientists has nally Share this article
made progress on a seemingly simple problem that has
bedeviled researchers for nearly six decades.

Kevin Hartnett Posed by the mathematicians Paul Erdős and Richard Rado in 1960, the Newsletter
Senior Writer problem concerns how often you would expect to nd patterns Get Quanta Magazine

resembling sun owers in large collections of objects, such as a large delivered to your inbox
October 21, 2019

scattering of points in the plane. While the new result doesn’t fully Subscribe now
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solve Erdős and Rado’s sun ower conjecture, it advances the Most recent newsletter

mathematical understanding of how surprisingly intricate structures

Abstractions

Combinatorics
emerge out of randomness. To do so, it reimagined the problem in
Computer Science terms of a computer function — taking advantage of the increasingly
Mathematics
rich interplay between theoretical computer science and pure
Ramsey Theory
mathematics.

“The paper is a new manifestation of a mathematical idea that’s going

to be a central idea of our time. The result itself is spectacular,” said
Gil Kalai of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The sun ower conjecture is about sets, which are collections of

objects. The conjecture is easiest to visualize if you think of sets of
points in the at xy-plane. First decide on a xed number of points you
want to include in each set. Then draw loops at random so that each
loop, or set, encompasses that number of points. It’s OK if the loops
overlap, so some points may end up inside more than one set, like the
intersections in a Venn diagram.

If you draw many loops containing a large number of points, most of

the loops will overlap and tangle like a snarl of brambles. But Erdős
and Rado predicted that a delicate structure would invariably arise:
Three or more sets would all partly overlap each other at exactly the
same subset of points, and none of them would overlap any other sets.

If you were to delete that common subset of points, the three sets
would be arrayed around a void, completely separate from each other
— like petals around the dark center of a sun ower. For the purposes
of the problem, the simplest kind of sun ower is considered to be one
with three sets that don’t overlap each other or any other sets; these
islands are called “disjoint” sets.

Lucy Reading-Ikkanda/Quanta Magazine

Erdős and Rado conjectured that as you draw more loops, a sun ower
inevitably emerges, either as disjoint sets or as sets that overlap in just
the right way. Their sun ower conjecture is part of a broader area of
mathematics called Ramsey theory, which studies how order begins to
appear as random systems grow larger.

“If you have a large enough mathematical object of some nature, there
has to be some hidden structure inside it,” said Shachar Lovett of the
University of California, San Diego, a co-author of the new work along
with Ryan Alweiss of Princeton University, Kewen Wu of Peking
University, and Jiapeng Zhang of Harvard University.

Erdős and Rado wanted to know precisely how many sets — of

precisely what size — you need in order to be guaranteed a sun ower.
They made a modest rst step toward solving the problem by
establishing a parameter, w, that stood for the number of points in
each set. The pair then proved you need about ww sets of size w to be
sure to nd a sun ower made of three sets. So, if you want each set to
contain 100 points, they proved you need on the order of 100100 sets to
be guaranteed a sun ower.

At the same time, Erdős and Rado conjectured that the

actual number of sets required to guarantee a
“
The paper is a new
sun ower is much smaller than ww — it’s more like a
manifestation of a
constant number to the w power (so 3w or 80w or
5,000,000w). Yet they couldn’t nd a way to prove
mathematical idea that’s
their intuition was correct.
going to be a central idea of
our time. The result itself is
“They said this problem looks extremely simple and spectacular.
were wondering why they couldn’t make progress on
it,” Alweiss said. ”
Gil Kalai, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

They weren’t the only ones. Between Erdős and Rado’s

rst result and this new proof 60 years later, only two mathematicians
made any progress on the question at all — and they only made
incremental advances, one in 1997 and the other earlier this year.

“Everyone had tried all the ideas that people were comfortable with,”
said Anup Rao of the University of Washington, who published a
follow-up paper that simpli ed the methods behind this new result.
“None of them seemed able to improve the basic bound Erdős and
Rado proved.”

By contrast, the new proof is a major advance.

The four researchers — a mix of mathematicians and computer

scientists — managed the feat by breaking the problem down into two
distinct scenarios. In the rst and easier scenario, they considered
what happens when the sets have substantial overlap, which makes it
relatively easy to understand when a sun ower has to appear.

“When you have a collection of elements that all belong to a large

collection of sets, there is a structure you can exploit” to nd a
sun ower, Lovett said.

The researchers rst ask whether there is a set of

points that’s common to some large fraction of the
total sets in the system. Once they’ve identi ed such a
set of points, they restrict their search for a sun ower
to the fraction of the total sets that contain this set of
points. They proceed in this fashion, re ning their
search to include a smaller and smaller fraction of the
total sets in the system that have more and more
points in common. This pruning continues until they
nd a sun ower.

Abstractions navigates promising ideas

In the second and more di cult scenario, they analyze
in science and mathematics. Journey
what happens when the sets don’t overlap much. In
with us and join the conversation.
that case, the most likely way to produce a sun ower is
to have three disjoint sets. But proving that three
See all Abstractions blog
entirely separate sets hide among a large number of
lightly overlapping ones isn’t easy.

That’s where the connection with computer science comes in. For
several years, two of the co-authors — Lovett and Zhang — had been
trying to analyze the sun ower problem using the same tools that
computer scientists use to study a type of program called a Boolean
function. These functions perform operations on a series of bits — 1s
and 0s — and output a single bit at the end, corresponding to whether
the computational statement is true (1) or false (0). For example, a
Boolean function might be programmed to output 1 if at least one of its
input bits is a 1, and to output a 0 if none of the inputs is a 1.

Three years ago, Lovett and Zhang realized that the question of
whether or not three disjoint sets are present among a collection of
lightly overlapping sets could be considered in the same way. First, you
assign each point in a particular set a label: 1 if it’s contained only in
that one set, and 0 if it’s not. The Boolean function will then output a 1
(true) if every input point is a 1 — meaning that every point in the set
is exclusively in that set, making the set disjoint. A “true” result
therefore indicates that the right conditions are present for you to nd
a sun ower.

By rigorously proving this correspondence, the R E L AT E D :

researchers brought extensive knowledge about

Boolean functions to bear on the under-resourced 1. A Puzzle of Clever Connections Nears a
Happy End
sun ower problem. They proved that (log w)w sets are
2. A Magical Answer to an 80-Year-Old
enough to yield a sun ower. Their new result doesn’t
Puzzle
get all the way to proving that the conjectured number
3. Cash for Math: The Erdős Prizes Live On
of sets (some constant number to the w power) is
su cient to guarantee a sun ower. But it is an order of magnitude
better than Erdős and Rado’s ww result, and it’s around the number of
sets the two predicted should be required to produce a sun ower.

After a half-century of failure, the new work suggests that a full

solution is in sight. It also further explains the inevitability with which
special shapes take root in the random mathematical wild.

This article was reprinted on Spektrum.de.

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