Shadows of ordered graphs

Abstract

Isoperimetric inequalities have been studied since antiquity, and in recent decades they have been studied extensively on discrete objects, such as the hypercube. An important special case of this problem involves bounding the size of the shadow of a set system, and the basic question was solved by Kruskal (in 1963) and Katona (in 1968). In this paper we introduce the concept of the shadow \d\G of a collection \G of ordered graphs, and prove the following, simple-sounding statement: if n \in \N is sufficiently large, |V(G)| = n for each G \in \G, and |\G| < n, then |\d \G| \ge |\G|. As a consequence, we substantially strengthen a result of Balogh, Bollob\'as and Morris on hereditary properties of ordered graphs: we show that if \P is such a property, and |\P_k| < k for some sufficiently large k \in \N, then |\P_n| is decreasing for k \le n < \infty.