English

Monochromatic odd cycles in edge-coloured complete graphs

Combinatorics 2024-12-11 v1

Abstract

It is easy to see that every qq-edge-colouring of the complete graph on 2q+12^q+1 vertices must contain a monochromatic odd cycle. A natural question raised by Erd\H{o}s and Graham in 19731973 asks for the smallest L(q)L(q) such that every qq-edge-colouring of K2q+1K_{2^q+1} must contain a monochromatic odd cycle of length at most L(q)L(q). In here, we show that L(q)=O(2qq1o(1))L(q)=O\left(\frac{2^q}{q^{1-o(1)}}\right) giving the first non-trivial upper bound on L(q)L(q).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2412.07708,
  title  = {Monochromatic odd cycles in edge-coloured complete graphs},
  author = {António Girão and Zach Hunter},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.07708},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

4 pages. Comments welcome!

R2 v1 2026-06-28T20:29:47.921Z