English

A Finite Graph Approach to the Probabilistic Hadwiger-Nelson Problem

Combinatorics 2020-08-19 v1

Abstract

We advance a probabilistic approach to the Hadwiger-Nelson problem initially developed by the Polymath16 project, in particular relating the approach to finite unit-distance graphs. We define the numerical \textit{badness} of a given kk-coloring of the plane to be the probability that a randomly chosen unit-distance edge is monochromatic under the coloring, and we provide lower bounds on the badness of arbitrary kk-colorings using a probabilistic technique relating to finite graphs. The contrapositive of the resulting bounds lets us compute lower bounds on the order of non kk-colorable unit-distance graphs, improving bounds produced by Pritikin and the Polymath16 project in the k=4k = 4 and k=5k = 5 cases. Additionally, we make partial progress on a probabilistic analog of the de Bruijn-Erd\H{o}s compactness theorem.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2008.07987,
  title  = {A Finite Graph Approach to the Probabilistic Hadwiger-Nelson Problem},
  author = {Haydn Gwyn and Jacob Stavrianos},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.07987},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

17 pages, 6 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T17:56:28.980Z