Re: Dick Lipton and Ken Regan • (1) • (2)

I need to think a little about the context Lipton and Regan have wrapped around the Frankl Conjecture, if not exactly about the problem itself.  This will be a scratch-worky post-in-progress (PIP❢), or a series of posts, and I may even delete it down the road if it runs out of gas or turns into too much nonsense.

Just to get started, let me post the passage from the 2nd of the above articles where I thought I spied something familiar, though it was late, past my bedtime, and I was pondering weak and weary, etc.

In order to understand the above formulas, we have to back up a little and pick up a couple of earlier definitions, rephrasing them slightly in the style of notation to which I would like you to become accustomed.

There is another way of expressing the bit flip operation I like a bit better.  Here is the formal definition, using instead of as the index of the indicated variable.

Definition.  Let the function be defined for each integer in the interval by the following equation:

It is conventional to write logical conjunction as multiplication, with or without a dot between conjuncts.  It is also convenient in many contexts to write logical negation with a tilde as or with distinctive parentheses as   Thus we may see the function written in either of the following forms:

Visually speaking, is a singular proposition which picks out a single cell of the associated venn diagram, namely, the cell where is false and all the rest of the are true.  In other work, I used the above notations for in defining minimal negation operators, which may eventually find use in this discussion.

This looks like a good place to break and start a second post in the series.

To be continued …