Stability for vertex isoperimetry in the cube

Abstract

We prove a stability version of Harper's cube vertex isoperimetric inequality, showing that subsets of the cube with vertex boundary close to the minimum possible are close to (generalised) Hamming balls. Furthermore, we obtain a local stability result for ball-like sets that gives a sharp estimate for the vertex boundary in terms of the distance from a ball, and so our stability result is essentially tight (modulo a non-monotonicity phenomenon). We also give similar results for the Kruskal--Katona Theorem and applications to new stability versions of some other results in Extremal Combinatorics.