English

Extremal triangle-free graphs with chromatic number at least four

Combinatorics 2025-10-21 v2

Abstract

Let GG be an nn-vertex triangle-free graph. The celebrated Mantel's theorem showed that e(G)n24e(G)\leq \lfloor\frac{n^2}{4}\rfloor. In 1962, Erd\H{o}s (together with Gallai), and independently Andr\'{a}sfai, proved that if GG is non-bipartite then e(G)(n1)24+1e(G)\leq \lfloor\frac{(n-1)^2}{4}\rfloor+1. In this paper, we extend this result and show that if GG has chromatic number at least four and n90n\geq 90, then e(G)(n3)24+5e(G)\leq \lfloor\frac{(n-3)^2}{4}\rfloor+5. The blow-ups of Gr\"{o}tzsch graph shows that this bound is best possible.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2404.07486,
  title  = {Extremal triangle-free graphs with chromatic number at least four},
  author = {Sijie Ren and Jian Wang and Shipeng Wang and Weihua Yang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.07486},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

14 pages, 4 figures, the proof is slightly improved