Maximal 3-wise Intersecting Families with Minimum Size: the Odd Case

A family $\mathcal{F}$ on ground set $\{1,2,\ldots, n\}$ is maximal $k$-wise intersecting if every collection of $k$ sets in $\mathcal{F}$ has non-empty intersection, and no other set can be added to $\mathcal{F}$ while maintaining this property. Erdős and Kleitman asked for the minimum size of a maximal $k$-wise intersecting family. Complementing earlier work of Hendrey, Lund, Tompkins and Tran, who answered this question for $k=3$ and large even $n$, we answer it for $k=3$ and large odd $n$. We show that the unique minimum family is obtained by partitioning the ground set into two sets $A$ and $B$ with almost equal sizes and taking the family consisting of all the proper supersets of $A$ and of $B$. A key ingredient of our proof is the stability result by Ellis and Sudakov about the so-called $2$-generator set systems.

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