The independence number
α(H) of a
hypergraph H is the maximum cardinality of a set of vertices of
H that does not contain an edge of
H. Generalizing Shearer’s classical lower bound on the independence number of triangle-free graphs Shearer (1991), and considerably improving recent results of Li and Zang (2006) and Chishti et al. (2014), we show that
for an
r-uniform
linear triangle-free
hypergraph H with
r≥2, where