Traces of Uniform Families of Sets

The trace of a set F on a another set X is F |X = F ∩ X and the trace of a family F of sets on X is FX = {F |X : F ∈ F}. In this note we prove that if a k-uniform family F ⊂ ([n] k ) has the property that for any k-subset X the trace F|X does not contain a maximal chain (a family C0 ⊂ C1 ⊂ ... ⊂ Ck with |Ci| = i), then |F| ≤ ( n−1 k−1 ) . This bound is sharp as shown by {F ∈ ([n] k ) , 1 ∈ F}. Our proof gives also the stability of the extremal family.