Rainbow triangles and the Erd\H{o}s-Hajnal problem in projective geometries
Abstract
We formulate a geometric version of the Erd\H{o}s-Hajnal conjecture that applies to finite projective geometries rather than graphs, in both its usual 'induced' form and the multicoloured form. The multicoloured conjecture states, roughly, that a colouring of the points of containing no copy of a fixed colouring of for small must contain a subspace of dimension polynomial in that avoids some colour. If , then is a colouring of a three-element 'triangle', and there are three essentially different cases, all of which we resolve. We derive both the cases where assigns the same colour to two different elements from a recent breakthrough result in additive combinatorics due to Kelley and Meka. We handle the case that is a 'rainbow' colouring by proving that rainbow-triangle-free colourings of projective geometries are exactly those that admit a certain decomposition into two-coloured pieces. This is closely analogous to a theorem of Gallai on rainbow-triangle-free coloured complete graphs. We also show that existing structure theorems resolve certain two-coloured cases where , and .
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2505.13781,
title = {Rainbow triangles and the Erd\H{o}s-Hajnal problem in projective geometries},
author = {Carolyn Chun and James Dylan Douthitt and Wayne Ge and Tony Huynh and Matthew E. Kroeker and Peter Nelson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.13781},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
40 pages, 0 figures