arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to David Conlon.
We show that in any two-coloring of the positive integers there is a color for which the set of positive integers that can be represented as a sum of distinct elements with this color has upper logarithmic density at least $(2+\sqrt{3})/4$ and this is best possible. This answers a forty-year-old question of Erdős.
Given an $r$-edge-coloring of the complete graph $K_n$, what is the largest number of edges in a monochromatic connected component? This natural question has only recently received the attention it deserves, with work by two disjoint subsets of the authors resolving it for the first two special cases, when $r = 2$ or $3$. Here we introduce a general framework for studying this problem and apply it to fully resolve the $r = 4$ case, showing that any $4$-edge-coloring of $K_n$ contains a monochromatic component with at least $\frac{1}{12}\binom{n}{2}$ edges, where the constant $\frac{1}{12}$ is optimal only when the coloring matches a certain construction of Gyárfás.
The Ramsey number $r(H)$ of a graph $H$ is the minimum integer $n$ such that any two-coloring of the edges of the complete graph $K_n$ contains a monochromatic copy of $H$. While this definition only asks for a single monochromatic copy of $H$, it is often the case that every two-edge-coloring of the complete graph on $r(H)$ vertices contains many monochromatic copies of $H$. The minimum number of such copies over all two-colorings of $K_{r(H)}$ will be referred to as the threshold Ramsey multiplicity of $H$. Addressing a problem of Harary and Prins, who were the first to systematically study this quantity, we show that there is a positive constant $c$ such that the threshold Ramsey multiplicity of a path or an even cycle on $k$ vertices is at least $(ck)^k$. This bound is tight up to the constant $c$. We prove a similar result for odd cycles in a companion paper.
For positive integers $n,r,s$ with $r > s$, the set-coloring Ramsey number $R(n;r,s)$ is the minimum $N$ such that if every edge of the complete graph $K_N$ receives a set of $s$ colors from a palette of $r$ colors, then there is guaranteed to be a monochromatic clique on $n$ vertices, that is, a subset of $n$ vertices where all of the edges between them receive a common color. In particular, the case $s=1$ corresponds to the classical multicolor Ramsey number. We prove general upper and lower bounds on $R(n;r,s)$ which imply that $R(n;r,s) = 2^{Θ(nr)}$ if $s/r$ is bounded away from $0$ and $1$. The upper bound extends an old result of Erdős and Szemerédi, who treated the case $s = r-1$, while the lower bound exploits a connection to error-correcting codes. We also study the analogous problem for hypergraphs.
Let $f(n,v,e)$ denote the maximum number of edges in a $3$-uniform hypergraph not containing $e$ edges spanned by at most $v$ vertices. One of the most influential open problems in extremal combinatorics then asks, for a given number of edges $e \geq 3$, what is the smallest integer $d=d(e)$ so that $f(n,e+d,e) = o(n^2)$? This question has its origins in work of Brown, Erdős and Sós from the early 70's and the standard conjecture is that $d(e)=3$ for every $e \geq 3$. The state of the art result regarding this problem was obtained in 2004 by Sárközy and Selkow, who showed that $f(n,e + 2 + \lfloor \log_2 e \rfloor,e) = o(n^2)$. The only improvement over this result was a recent breakthrough of Solymosi and Solymosi, who improved the bound for $d(10)$ from 5 to 4. We obtain the first asymptotic improvement over the Sárközy--Selkow bound, showing that $$ f(n, e + O(\log e/ \log\log e), e) = o(n^2). $$
We show that every two-colouring of the edges of the complete graph $K_n$ contains a monochromatic trail or circuit of length at least $2n^2/9 +o(n^2)$, which is asymptotically best possible.
The book graph $B_n^{(k)}$ consists of $n$ copies of $K_{k+1}$ joined along a common $K_k$. The Ramsey numbers of $B_n^{(k)}$ are known to have strong connections to the classical Ramsey numbers of cliques. Recently, the first author determined the asymptotic order of these Ramsey numbers for fixed $k$, thus answering an old question of Erdős, Faudree, Rousseau, and Schelp. In this paper, we first provide a simpler proof of this theorem. Next, answering a question of the first author, we present a different proof that avoids the use of Szemerédi's regularity lemma, thus providing much tighter control on the error term. Finally, we prove a conjecture of Nikiforov, Rousseau, and Schelp by showing that all extremal colorings for this Ramsey problem are quasirandom.
We develop a sparse graph regularity method that applies to graphs with few 4-cycles, including new counting and removal lemmas for 5-cycles in such graphs. Some applications include: * Every $n$-vertex graph with no 5-cycle can be made triangle-free by deleting $o(n^{3/2})$ edges. * For $r \geq 3$, every $n$-vertex $r$-graph with girth greater than $5$ has $o(n^{3/2})$ edges. * Every subset of $[n]$ without a nontrivial solution to the equation $x_1 + x_2 + 2x_3 = x_4 + 3x_5$ has size $o(\sqrt{n})$.
By using random multilinear maps, we provide new lower bounds for the Erdős box problem, the problem of estimating the extremal number of the complete $d$-partite $d$-uniform hypergraph with two vertices in each part, thereby improving on work of Gunderson, Rödl and Sidorenko.
The Ramsey number $r(H)$ of a graph $H$ is the minimum $n$ such that any two-coloring of the edges of the complete graph $K_n$ contains a monochromatic copy of $H$. The threshold Ramsey multiplicity $m(H)$ is then the minimum number of monochromatic copies of $H$ taken over all two-edge-colorings of $K_{r(H)}$. The study of this concept was first proposed by Harary and Prins almost fifty years ago. In a companion paper, the authors have shown that there is a positive constant $c$ such that the threshold Ramsey multiplicity for a path or even cycle with $k$ vertices is at least $(ck)^k$, which is tight up to the value of $c$. Here, using different methods, we show that the same result also holds for odd cycles with $k$ vertices.
We show that there is a constant $c$ such that any colouring of the cube $[3]^n$ in $c \log \log n$ colours contains a monochromatic combinatorial line.
For a fixed graph $H$, what is the smallest number of colours $C$ such that there is a proper edge-colouring of the complete graph $K_n$ with $C$ colours containing no two vertex-disjoint colour-isomorphic copies, or repeats, of $H$? We study this function and its generalisation to more than two copies using a variety of combinatorial, probabilistic and algebraic techniques. For example, we show that for any tree $T$ there exists a constant $c$ such that any proper edge-colouring of $K_n$ with at most $c n^2$ colours contains two repeats of $T$, while there are colourings with at most $c' n^{3/2}$ colours for some absolute constant $c'$ containing no three repeats of any tree with at least two edges. We also show that for any graph $H$ containing a cycle there exist $k$ and $c$ such that there is a proper edge-colouring of $K_n$ with at most $c n$ colours containing no $k$ repeats of $H$, while, for a tree $T$ with $m$ edges, a colouring with $o(n^{(m+1)/m})$ colours contains $ω(1)$ repeats of $T$.
For which graphs $F$ is there a sparse $F$-counting lemma in $C_4$-free graphs? We are interested in identifying graphs $F$ with the property that, roughly speaking, if $G$ is an $n$-vertex $C_4$-free graph with on the order of $n^{3/2}$ edges, then the density of $F$ in $G$, after a suitable normalization, is approximately at least the density of $F$ in an $ε$-regular approximation of $G$. In recent work, motivated by applications in extremal and additive combinatorics, we showed that $C_5$ has this property. Here we construct a family of graphs with the property.
We develop novel techniques which allow us to prove a diverse range of results relating to subset sums and complete sequences of positive integers, including solutions to several longstanding open problems. These include: solutions to the three problems of Burr and Erdős on Ramsey complete sequences, for which Erdős later offered a combined total of \$350; analogous results for the new notion of density complete sequences; the solution to a conjecture of Alon and Erdős on the minimum number of colors needed to color the positive integers less than $n$ so that $n$ cannot be written as a monochromatic sum; the exact determination of an extremal function introduced by Erdős and Graham on sets of integers avoiding a given subset sum; and, answering a question reiterated by several authors, a homogeneous strengthening of a seminal result of Szemerédi and Vu on long arithmetic progressions in subset sums.
The Zarankiewicz problem asks for an estimate on $z(m, n; s, t)$, the largest number of $1$'s in an $m \times n$ matrix with all entries $0$ or $1$ containing no $s \times t$ submatrix consisting entirely of $1$'s. We show that a classical upper bound for $z(m, n; s, t)$ due to Kővári, Sós and Turán is tight up to the constant for a broad range of parameters. The proof relies on a new quantitative variant of the random algebraic method.
A celebrated conjecture of Sidorenko and Erdős-Simonovits states that, for all bipartite graphs $H$, quasirandom graphs contain asymptotically the minimum number of copies of $H$ taken over all graphs with the same order and edge density. This conjecture has attracted considerable interest over the last decade and is now known to hold for a broad range of bipartite graphs, with the overall trend saying that a graph satisfies the conjecture if it can be built from simple building blocks such as trees in a certain recursive fashion. Our contribution here, which goes beyond this paradigm, is to show that the conjecture holds for any bipartite graph $H$ with bipartition $A \cup B$ where the number of vertices in $B$ of degree $k$ satisfies a certain divisibility condition for each $k$. As a corollary, we have that for every bipartite graph $H$ with bipartition $A \cup B$, there is a positive integer $p$ such that the blow-up $H_A^p$ formed by taking $p$ vertex-disjoint copies of $H$ and gluing all copies of $A$ along corresponding vertices satisfies the conjecture. Another way of viewing this latter result is that for every bipartite $H$ there is a positive integer $p$ such that an $L^p$-version of Sidorenko's conjecture holds for $H$.
We give a simple geometric interpretation of an algebraic construction of Wenger that yields $n$-vertex graphs with no cycle of length $4$, $6$ or $10$ and close to the maximum number of edges.
We give an exponential improvement to the lower bound on diagonal Ramsey numbers for any fixed number of colors greater than two.