English

Pure pairs. I. Trees and linear anticomplete pairs

Combinatorics 2020-09-08 v3

Abstract

The Erdos-Hajnal Conjecture asserts that for every graph H there is a constant c > 0 such that every graph G that does not contain H as an induced subgraph has a clique or stable set of cardinality at least |G|^c. In this paper, we prove a conjecture of Liebenau and Pilipczuk, that for every forest H there exists c > 0, such that every graph G contains either an induced copy of H, or a vertex of degree at least c|G|, or two disjoint sets of at least c|G| vertices with no edges between them. It follows that for every forest H there is c > 0 so that if G contains neither H nor its complement as an induced subgraph then there is a clique or stable set of cardinality at least |G|^c.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1809.00919,
  title  = {Pure pairs. I. Trees and linear anticomplete pairs},
  author = {Maria Chudnovsky and Alex Scott and Paul Seymour and Sophie Spirkl},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1809.00919},
  year   = {2020}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T03:53:35.542Z