English

An improved lower bound for Folkman's theorem

Combinatorics 2017-06-28 v2

Abstract

Folkman's Theorem asserts that for each kNk \in \mathbb{N}, there exists a natural number n=F(k)n = F(k) such that whenever the elements of [n][n] are two-coloured, there exists a set A[n]A \subset [n] of size kk with the property that all the sums of the form xBx\sum_{x \in B} x, where BB is a nonempty subset of AA, are contained in [n][n] and have the same colour. In 1989, Erd\H{o}s and Spencer showed that F(k)2ck2/logkF(k) \ge 2^{ck^2/ \log k}, where c>0c >0 is an absolute constant; here, we improve this bound significantly by showing that F(k)22k1/kF(k) \ge 2^{2^{k-1}/k} for all kNk\in \mathbb{N}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1703.02473,
  title  = {An improved lower bound for Folkman's theorem},
  author = {József Balogh and Sean Eberhard and Bhargav Narayanan and Andrew Treglown and Adam Zsolt Wagner},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1703.02473},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

5 pages, Bulletin of the LMS

R2 v1 2026-06-22T18:38:43.568Z