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A triple system is cancellative if it does not contain three distinct sets A , B , C such that the symmetric difference of A and B is contained in C. We show that every cancellative triple system H that satisfies a particular inequality between the sizes of H and its shadow must be structurally close to the balanced blowup of some Steiner triple system. Our result contains a stability theorem for cancellative triple systems due to Keevash and Mubayi as a special case. It also implies that the boundary of the feasible region of cancellative triple systems has infinitely many local maxima, thus giving the first example showing this phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a method which provides a unified framework for most stability theorems that have been proved in graph and hypergraph theory. Our main result reduces stability for a large class of hypergraph problems to the simpler question of checking that a hypergraph H with large minimum degree that omits the forbidden structures is vertex-extendable. This means that if v is a vertex of H and H − v is a subgraph of the extremal configuration(s), then H is also a subgraph of the extremal configuration(s). In many cases vertex-extendability is quite easy to verify. We illustrate our approach by giving new short proofs of hypergraph stability results of Pikhurko, Hefetz-Keevash, Brandt-Irwin-Jiang, Bene Watts-Norin-Yepremyan and others. Since our method always yields minimum degree stability, which is the strongest form of stability, in some of these cases our stability results are stronger than what was known earlier. Along the way, we clarify the different notions of stability that have been previously studied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Let F be a family of r -uniform hypergraphs. The feasible region Ω (F) of F is the set of points (x , y) in the unit square such that there exists a sequence of F -free r -uniform hypergraphs whose shadow density approaches x and whose edge density approaches y. The feasible region provides a lot of combinatorial information, for example, the supremum of y over all (x , y) ∈ Ω (F) is the Turán density π (F) , and Ω (∅) gives the Kruskal-Katona theorem. We undertake a systematic study of Ω (F) , and prove that Ω (F) is completely determined by a left-continuous almost everywhere differentiable function; and moreover, there exists an F for which this function is not continuous. We also extend some old related theorems. For example, we generalize a result of Fisher and Ryan to hypergraphs and extend a classical result of Bollobás by almost completely determining the feasible region for cancellative triple systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]