English

On the number of monotone sequences

Combinatorics 2014-05-28 v1

Abstract

One of the most classical results in Ramsey theory is the theorem of Erd\H{o}s and Szekeres from 1935, which says that every sequence of more than k2k^2 numbers contains a monotone subsequence of length k+1k+1. We address the following natural question motivated by this result: Given integers kk and nn with nk2+1n \geq k^2+1, how many monotone subsequences of length k+1k+1 must every sequence of nn numbers contain? We answer this question precisely for all sufficiently large kk and nk2+ck3/2/logkn \leq k^2 + c k^{3/2} / \log k, where cc is some absolute positive constant.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1405.6894,
  title  = {On the number of monotone sequences},
  author = {Wojciech Samotij and Benny Sudakov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1405.6894},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

24 pages, 2 figures