We prove both the general modular intersection bound for a set family and its sharper uniform version, the Frankl-Wilson theorem. Let be prime, let have size , and let be a family of subsets of . Suppose each member's cardinality modulo is outside , whereas every intersection of two distinct members has cardinality modulo in . Then the general modular intersection bound is
with for . If every member has the same size and , the uniform Frankl-Wilson theorem sharpens this to
Here , so in particular . Primality matters because the argument takes place over the finite field .
For each , define the polynomial
At the indicator vector of another member , this polynomial is zero if and nonzero if . Replace every positive power of by in its expanded monomials, obtaining a multilinear polynomial of degree at most . This multilinear reduction on the Boolean cube preserves values at every zero-one vector.
The resulting polynomials are linearly independent. Indeed, if , evaluating at leaves ; the nonzero diagonal value forces for every . But multilinear polynomials of degree at most lie in the vector space with basis , whose dimension is . The bound on the dimension of a vector space gives the general modular intersection bound for a set family. This is the polynomial method in combinatorics: the intersection conditions produce an evaluation matrix with nonzero diagonal and zero off-diagonal entries.
To prove the sharper uniform bound, we first establish injectivity of inclusion between adjacent set layers. Over a field with field characteristic zero or greater than , suppose coefficients , indexed by -sets in , satisfy
Then all coefficients are zero. For this is immediate. For , fix distinct and subtract the equations for and , where is a -set avoiding . The result is
Apply mathematical induction with degree on the remaining coordinates; its size condition holds because . This forces for every such . Since all -sets are linked by one-element exchanges, all coefficients equal some . An original equation then gives , and the characteristic assumption gives .
For every with , now form the multilinear polynomial
This is the multilinear reduction of , so it vanishes at every indicator vector of a -set. These are linearly independent: in a nonzero linear relation choose the largest degree of a coefficient-bearing . The degree- terms have coefficients . The inclusion lemma makes these nonzero unless all degree- coefficients vanish, a contradiction. It applies because , , and .
The are also independent jointly with the . Evaluating a relation at the indicator vectors of the family first forces every coefficient of to vanish, since the vanish there; their own independence then kills the remaining coefficients. All these polynomials have degree at most , so
Subtracting the lower-degree contribution proves the sharp Frankl-Wilson theorem. For the general bound already gives , so no auxiliary polynomials are needed.
For the even cross-intersection assertion, work instead in the vector space over a finite field and let
The parity assumption is exactly in . By bilinearity, all vectors in are orthogonal to all vectors in , giving . The coordinate dot product is nondegenerate over , so . There is no requirement that be zero; only this dimension formula is used. Each distinct set has a distinct indicator vector, and a dimension- binary vector space has elements. Therefore the even cross-intersection bound is
This is the even cross-intersection bound, including empty families, for which the product is zero.
For odd intersections, append a final coordinate one to every indicator vector:
Their dot product is in . Applying the same orthogonal complement over the binary field argument to their spans, now in dimension , gives the required odd cross-intersection bound:
Appending the coordinate preserves distinctness of the vectors, so the span-cardinality estimates remain valid. This proves the odd cross-intersection bound directly by reducing the odd condition to an even one in a larger vector space.
A binary block code of length is a subset . Its size is , and its minimum Hamming distance is
Thus an code consists of binary words of length whose distinct pairs differ in at least coordinates. When , every set of distinct words qualifies. Taking all of the binary vector space gives words, and no code can contain more words than its ambient space. Hence
The group is a vector space over a finite field, namely , because every element has order at most two. It is infinite-dimensional. The complete first-order theory of infinite-dimensional -vector spaces says, for each , that there are linearly independent vectors; the usual elimination argument for vector spaces shows that all infinite-dimensional -vector spaces are elementarily equivalent.
Every countably infinite model of this theory has dimension : finite dimension would make it finite, while uncountable dimension would make its underlying set uncountable. Any two vector spaces over the same field with the same dimension are isomorphic. Therefore is aleph-zero-categorical, as recorded by the aleph-zero-categoricity of an infinite-dimensional vector space over a finite field.