English

Rainbow triangles and the Erd\H{o}s-Hajnal problem in projective geometries

Combinatorics 2025-10-17 v3

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 cc of the points of PG(n1,q)\mathsf{PG}(n-1,q) containing no copy of a fixed colouring c0c_0 of PG(k1,q)\mathsf{PG}(k-1,q) for small kk must contain a subspace of dimension polynomial in nn that avoids some colour. If (k,q)=(2,2)(k,q) = (2,2), then c0c_0 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 c0c_0 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 c0c_0 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 (k,q)=(2,3)(k,q) = (2,3), and (k,q)=(3,2)(k,q) = (3,2).

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}
}

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40 pages, 0 figures