English

Induced subgraph density. VII. The five-vertex path

Combinatorics 2026-02-25 v3

Abstract

We prove the Erd\H{o}s-Hajnal conjecture for the five-vertex path P5P_5; that is, there exists c>0c>0 such that every nn-vertex graph with no induced P5P_5 has a clique or stable set of size at least ncn^c. This completes the verification of the Erd\H{o}s-Hajnal property of all five-vertex graphs. Our methods combine probabilistic and structural ideas with the iterative sparsification framework introduced in the third and fourth papers in the series.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2312.15333,
  title  = {Induced subgraph density. VII. The five-vertex path},
  author = {Tung Nguyen and Alex Scott and Paul Seymour},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.15333},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

19 pages, accepted version

R2 v1 2026-06-28T14:00:49.445Z