English

Avoiding short progressions in Euclidean Ramsey theory

Combinatorics 2025-10-21 v3 Number Theory

Abstract

We provide a general framework to construct colorings avoiding short monochromatic arithmetic progressions in Euclidean Ramsey theory. Specifically, if m\ell_m denotes mm collinear points with consecutive points of distance one apart, we say that En↛(r,s)\mathbb{E}^n \not \to (\ell_r,\ell_s) if there is a red/blue coloring of nn-dimensional Euclidean space that avoids red congruent copies of r\ell_r and blue congruent copies of s\ell_s. We show that En↛(3,20)\mathbb{E}^n \not \to (\ell_3, \ell_{20}), improving the best-known result En↛(3,1177)\mathbb{E}^n \not \to (\ell_3, \ell_{1177}) by F\"uhrer and T\'oth, and also establish En↛(4,14)\mathbb{E}^n \not \to (\ell_4, \ell_{14}) and En↛(5,8)\mathbb{E}^n \not \to (\ell_5, \ell_{8}) in the spirit of the classical result En↛(6,6)\mathbb{E}^n \not \to (\ell_6, \ell_{6}) due to Erd\H{o}s et. al. We also show a number of similar 33-coloring results, as well as En↛(3,α6889)\mathbb{E}^n \not \to (\ell_3, \alpha\ell_{6889}), where α\alpha is an arbitrary positive real number. This final result answers a question of F\"uhrer and T\'oth in the positive.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2404.19233,
  title  = {Avoiding short progressions in Euclidean Ramsey theory},
  author = {Gabriel Currier and Kenneth Moore and Chi Hoi Yip},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.19233},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

14 pages, revised based on referee comments

R2 v1 2026-06-28T16:10:42.209Z