The story of sunflowers

Abstract Sunflowers, or ‐systems, are a fundamental concept in combinatorics introduced by Erdős and Rado in their paper: [J. London Math. Soc. (1) 35 (1960), 85–90]. A sunflower is a collection of sets where all pairs have the same intersection. This paper explores the wide‐ranging applications of sunflowers in computer science and combinatorics. We discuss recent progress toward the sunflower conjecture and present a short elementary proof of the best known bounds for the robust sunflower lemma.