Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2001 iii Paper 11 2 Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
On an independent Bernoulli product measure, the Harris-Kleitman inequality states that increasing events obeyThe same holds for two decreasing events; an increasing and a decreasing event have the reversed inequality.
Prove the stronger function version by induction on the number of coordinates. For increasing bounded functions , condition on the last coordinate , with . The law of total covariance givesThe first term is nonnegative by induction, and the other factors are nonnegative by monotonicity. The one-coordinate case is the same formula without the first term. Event indicators prove the assertion. Two decreasing functions follow by replacing both by their negatives; replacing only one gives negative correlation of increasing and decreasing events.
Here is a precise Janson inequality and its lower-tail concentration form. Let indicate containment of a specified set of independent Bernoulli coordinates, set , , and letThis Janson dependency sum is ordered and excludes the diagonal. ThenA zero denominator means the trivial case almost surely.
To prove the avoidance bound, expose the avoidance events in order. For a fixed , separate earlier indices into those whose supports are disjoint from and those overlapping it. Write for avoidance of the first group and for avoidance of the second. The event is independent of , while is decreasing and is increasing. The correlation inequality therefore givesThe first inequality divides a nonnegative numerator by ; the second uses a union bound and negative correlation with . Conditioning events of zero probability already make full avoidance impossible. Multiply the resulting conditional avoidance bounds to obtain the Janson sequential product lemma. Taking logarithms and using gives , since each unordered dependency pair is counted once in the sequential sum.
For the Janson lower-tail bound by independent thinning, attach independent selectors of probability to the events. Their total expectation and dependency sum are , so avoidance of the selected events givesSet and apply the exponential Markov bound to . Using yieldsChoosing proves the concentration assertion. For avoidance alone, optimizing also gives when , and the original bound gives when .
To outline the sharp chromatic application, view an independent set of as a clique of its complement, whose edge probability is . Fix , let and . For a particular -vertex set, let count independent -sets. Then , and the overlap calculation givesOverlap of only one vertex shares no edge, hence is independent. For completeness, the summand is at most . Since eventually, large overlaps are bounded by ; finitely many smaller overlaps are dominated by . Also , so the diagonal contribution is negligible. The concentration bound consequently givesA union bound over at most vertex sets still tends to zero. Thus independent sets in every large subset of a dense random graph are available uniformly, including adaptively obtained remainders. Repeatedly remove an independent -set and give it a new colour, then colour the fewer than leftover vertices individually. This uses at most colours. Combining with the first-moment lower bound and letting fixed be arbitrarily small gives the accurate leading asymptoticThe uniform subset estimate, rather than merely the existence of one large independent set, is what makes the sharp upper bound possible.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2023 iii Paper 122 1 a Solution 2026-09-28
In an independent Bernoulli product space, an event is increasing if changing any coordinate from to cannot destroy it. Harris' inequality says that two increasing events satisfyEquivalently, two decreasing events are positively correlated.
For Janson inequalities, let be a random subset of a finite ground set whose elements are selected independently, let be fixed subsets, and putWrite when and , and define the ordered dependency sumThe first Janson inequality isThe usual extended form isThere is also the complementary lower boundand if for all , the product is at least .
For the proof, order arbitrarily and expose the avoidance events one at a time. The standard Janson sequential product lemma, obtained by conditioning and using Harris' inequality on the coordinates outside , givesUsing and summing the pair terms yields . If , this is at most . If , adjoin an independent Bernoulli coordinate of mean to each index and intersect with the event that its new coordinate is . The event implies that none of these thinned events occurs, while the thinned family has mean and dependency sum . Applying the first inequality in the enlarged product space givesFinally, the events are decreasing, so repeated Harris' inequality proves the product lower bound; gives its exponential version.