English

Erd\H{o}s-Szekeres theorem for multidimensional arrays

Combinatorics 2022-04-14 v2

Abstract

The classical Erd\H{o}s-Szekeres theorem dating back almost a hundred years states that any sequence of (n1)2+1(n-1)^2+1 distinct real numbers contains a monotone subsequence of length nn. This theorem has been generalised to higher dimensions in a variety of ways but perhaps the most natural one was proposed by Fishburn and Graham more than 25 years ago. They defined the concept of a monotone and a lex-monotone array and asked how large an array one needs in order to be able to find a monotone or a lex-monotone subarray of size n××nn \times \ldots \times n. Fishburn and Graham obtained Ackerman-type bounds in both cases. We significantly improve these results. Regardless of the dimension we obtain at most a triple exponential bound in nn in the monotone case and a quadruple exponential one in the lex-monotone case.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1910.13318,
  title  = {Erd\H{o}s-Szekeres theorem for multidimensional arrays},
  author = {M. Bucić and B. Sudakov and T. Tran},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.13318},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

18 pages, 5 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T11:58:27.416Z