English

Books versus triangles at the extremal density

Combinatorics 2019-10-22 v2

Abstract

A celebrated result of Mantel shows that every graph on nn vertices with n2/4+1\lfloor n^2/4 \rfloor + 1 edges must contain a triangle. A robust version of this result, due to Rademacher, says that there must in fact be at least n/2\lfloor n/2 \rfloor triangles in any such graph. Another strengthening, due to the combined efforts of many authors starting with Erd\H{o}s, says that any such graph must have an edge which is contained in at least n/6n/6 triangles. Following Mubayi, we study the interplay between these two results, that is, between the number of triangles in such graphs and their book number, the largest number of triangles sharing an edge. Among other results, Mubayi showed that for any 1/6β<1/41/6 \leq \beta < 1/4 there is γ>0\gamma > 0 such that any graph on nn vertices with at least n2/4+1\lfloor n^2/4\rfloor + 1 edges and book number at most βn\beta n contains at least (γo(1))n3(\gamma -o(1))n^3 triangles. He also asked for a more precise estimate for γ\gamma in terms of β\beta. We make a conjecture about this dependency and prove this conjecture for β=1/6\beta = 1/6 and for 0.2495β<1/40.2495 \leq \beta < 1/4, thereby answering Mubayi's question in these ranges.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1905.05312,
  title  = {Books versus triangles at the extremal density},
  author = {David Conlon and Jacob Fox and Benny Sudakov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.05312},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

15 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-23T09:05:20.663Z