Monochromatic configurations on a circle
Abstract
If we two-colour a circle, we can always find an inscribed triangle with angles whose three vertices have the same colour. In fact, Bialostocki and Nielsen showed that it is enough to consider the colours on the vertices of an inscribed heptagon. We prove that for every other triangle there is a two-colouring of the circle without any monochromatic copy of . More generally, for , call a -tuple with and a Ramsey -tuple if the following is true: in every two-colouring of the circle of unit perimeter, there is a monochromatic -tuple of points in which the distances of cyclically consecutive points, measured along the arcs, are in some order. By a conjecture of Stromquist, if , then is Ramsey. Our main result is a proof of the converse of this conjecture. That is, we show that if is Ramsey, then . We do this by finding connections of the problem to certain questions from number theory about partitioning into so-called Beatty sequences. We also disprove a majority version of Stromquist's conjecture, study a robust version, and discuss a discrete version.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2504.10687,
title = {Monochromatic configurations on a circle},
author = {Gábor Damásdi and Nóra Frankl and János Pach and Dömötör Pálvölgyi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.10687},
year = {2025}
}