Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge / 2013 / iii / Paper 19 / 2 / iv / b

Take the graphs $G_{\zeta }=\{(\delta ,S_{\zeta }(\delta )):\delta <\kappa \}$. Each has size $\kappa$, and any two meet in fewer than $\kappa$ points, because their functions are eventually strictly ordered. Fix a bijection $b:\kappa \times \kappa \to \kappa$ and let $A_{\zeta }=b[G_{\zeta }]\in [\kappa {]}^{\kappa }$.

Given $I\in [{\kappa }^{+}{]}^{\kappa }$, enumerate it as $\{{\zeta }_{\eta }:\eta <\kappa \}$ and trim the sets in this order:The deleted part is a union of fewer than $\kappa$ pairwise intersections, each of size less than $\kappa$. Regularity ensures its size is less than $\kappa$. If $\nu <\eta$, then $A_{{\zeta }_{\eta }}^{\ast }$ is disjoint even from the full earlier $A_{{\zeta }_{\nu }}$, hence from its trimmed version. Thus all the retained sets are pairwise disjoint and each lost fewer than $\kappa$ elements. This provesThe argument is the essential disjointness of small subfamilies of a regular-cardinal almost disjoint family.