English

Monochromatic triangles in two-colored plane

Combinatorics 2011-04-29 v1 Metric Geometry

Abstract

We prove that for any partition of the plane into a closed set CC and an open set OO and for any configuration TT of three points, there is a translated and rotated copy of TT contained in CC or in OO. Apart from that, we consider partitions of the plane into two sets whose common boundary is a union of piecewise linear curves. We show that for any such partition and any configuration TT which is a vertex set of a non-equilateral triangle there is a copy of TT contained in the interior of one of the two partition classes. Furthermore, we give the characterization of these "polygonal" partitions that avoid copies of a given equilateral triple. These results support a conjecture of Erdos, Graham, Montgomery, Rothschild, Spencer and Straus, which states that every two-coloring of the plane contains a monochromatic copy of any nonequilateral triple of points; on the other hand, we disprove a stronger conjecture by the same authors, by providing non-trivial examples of two-colorings that avoid a given equilateral triple.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.math/0701940,
  title  = {Monochromatic triangles in two-colored plane},
  author = {Vit Jelinek and Jan Kyncl and Rudolf Stolar and Tomas Valla},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:math/0701940},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

20 pages, 9 figures