Structured sunflowers and canonical Ramsey properties
Abstract
A first-order structure is said to have the infinite sunflower property if, for each and each structure whose elements are -sets, there is , , such that is a sunflower: a collection of sets such that each pair of elements has the same intersection. A class of finite structures is said to have the finite sunflower property if for all and , there is such that any structure whose elements consist of -sets contains a copy of which is a sunflower. These two notions were introduced by Ackerman, Karker and Mirabi in a recent paper, and give a structural generalisation of the well-known Erd\H{o}s-Rado sunflower lemma for sets. We show two results for countable ultrahomogeneous relational structures with strong amalgamation: first, the infinite sunflower property is equivalent to the canonical infinite point-Ramsey property; second, a certain strengthening of the canonical finite point-Ramsey property implies the finite sunflower property. (Here, "canonical" refers to statements analogous to the Erd\H{o}s-Rado canonical Ramsey theorem, involving colourings with infinitely many colours.) We also show that all free amalgamation classes with a single vertex isomorphism-type have the finite sunflower property, as do many classes of finite metric spaces, and we give a variety of further examples and observations.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2602.04610,
title = {Structured sunflowers and canonical Ramsey properties},
author = {Rob Sullivan and Jeroen Winkel},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.04610},
year = {2026}
}