Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 February 2010
It has been shown by Mirsky and Perfect [1] that the theorem of Rado [2], linking matroid theory and transversal theory, has important applications in combinatorial theory. In this note I use it to obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for two families of sets to have a common transversal containing a given set, and then I show how it may be used to obtain a variant of a well-known theorem that was obtained by Hoffman and Kuhn [3] using linear programming methods.