English

Constrained Ramsey Numbers

Combinatorics 2011-11-10 v2

Abstract

For two graphs S and T, the constrained Ramsey number f(S, T) is the minimum n such that every edge coloring of the complete graph on n vertices, with any number of colors, has a monochromatic subgraph isomorphic to S or a rainbow (all edges differently colored) subgraph isomorphic to T. The Erdos-Rado Canonical Ramsey Theorem implies that f(S, T) exists if and only if S is a star or T is acyclic, and much work has been done to determine the rate of growth of f(S, T) for various types of parameters. When S and T are both trees having s and t edges respectively, Jamison, Jiang, and Ling showed that f(S, T) <= O(st^2) and conjectured that it is always at most O(st). They also mentioned that one of the most interesting open special cases is when T is a path. In this work, we study this case and show that f(S, P_t) = O(st log t), which differs only by a logarithmic factor from the conjecture. This substantially improves the previous bounds for most values of s and t.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0706.2107,
  title  = {Constrained Ramsey Numbers},
  author = {Po-Shen Loh and Benny Sudakov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0706.2107},
  year   = {2011}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-21T08:38:28.958Z