Partitions versus sets : a case of duality

Abstract

In a recent paper, Amini et al. introduce a general framework to prove duality theorems between special decompositions and their dual combinatorial object. They thus unify all known ad-hoc proofs in one single theorem. While this unification process is definitely good, their main theorem remains quite technical and does not give a real insight of why some decompositions admit dual objects and why others do not. The goal of this paper is both to generalise a little this framework and to give an enlightening simple proof of its central theorem.