English

A canonical Ramsey theorem for exactly $m$-coloured complete subgraphs

Combinatorics 2016-09-07 v2

Abstract

Given an edge colouring of a graph with a set of mm colours, we say that the graph is (exactly) mm-coloured if each of the colours is used. We consider edge colourings of the complete graph on N\mathbb{N} with infinitely many colours and show that either one can find an mm-coloured complete subgraph for every natural number mm or there exists an infinite subset XNX \subset \mathbb{N} coloured in one of two canonical ways: either the colouring is injective on XX or there exists a distinguished vertex vv in XX such that X{v}X \setminus \lbrace v \rbrace is 11-coloured and each edge between vv and X{v}X \setminus \lbrace v \rbrace has a distinct colour (all different to the colour used on X{v}X \setminus \lbrace v \rbrace). This answers a question posed by Stacey and Weidl in 1999. The techniques that we develop also enable us to resolve some further questions about finding mm-coloured complete subgraphs in colourings with finitely many colours.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1303.2997,
  title  = {A canonical Ramsey theorem for exactly $m$-coloured complete subgraphs},
  author = {Teeradej Kittipassorn and Bhargav Narayanan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1303.2997},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

16 pages, improved presentation, fixed misprints, Combinatorics, Probability and Computing

R2 v1 2026-06-21T23:41:03.736Z