Vertex Ramsey problems in the hypercube

If we 2-color the vertices of a large hypercube what monochromatic substructures are we guaranteed to find? Call a set S of vertices from Q_d, the d-dimensional hypercube, Ramsey if any 2-coloring of the vertices of Q_n, for n sufficiently large, contains a monochromatic copy of S. Ramsey's theorem tells us that for any r \geq 1 every 2-coloring of a sufficiently large r-uniform hypergraph will contain a large monochromatic clique (a complete subhypergraph): hence any set of vertices from Q_d that all have the same weight is Ramsey. A natural question to ask is: which sets S corresponding to unions of cliques of different weights from Q_d are Ramsey? The answer to this question depends on the number of cliques involved. In particular we determine which unions of 2 or 3 cliques are Ramsey and then show, using a probabilistic argument, that any non-trivial union of 39 or more cliques of different weights cannot be Ramsey. A key tool is a lemma which reduces questions concerning monochromatic configurations in the hypercube to questions about monochromatic translates of sets of integers.Comment: 26 pages, 3 figure

Problems in extremal graph theory

We consider a variety of problems in extremal graph and set theory. The {\em chromatic number} of $G$, $\chi(G)$, is the smallest integer $k$ such that $G$ is $k$-colorable. The {\it square} of $G$, written $G^2$, is the supergraph of $G$ in which also vertices within distance 2 of each other in $G$ are adjacent. A graph $H$ is a {\it minor} of $G$ if $H$ can be obtained from a subgraph of $G$ by contracting edges. We show that the upper bound for $\chi(G^2)$ conjectured by Wegner (1977) for planar graphs holds when $G$ is a $K_4$-minor-free graph. We also show that $\chi(G^2)$ is equal to the bound only when $G^2$ contains a complete graph of that order. One of the central problems of extremal hypergraph theory is finding the maximum number of edges in a hypergraph that does not contain a specific forbidden structure. We consider as a forbidden structure a fixed number of members that have empty common intersection as well as small union. We obtain a sharp upper bound on the size of uniform hypergraphs that do not contain this structure, when the number of vertices is sufficiently large. Our result is strong enough to imply the same sharp upper bound for several other interesting forbidden structures such as the so-called strong simplices and clusters. The {\em $n$-dimensional hypercube}, $Q_n$, is the graph whose vertex set is $\{0,1\}^n$ and whose edge set consists of the vertex pairs differing in exactly one coordinate. The generalized Tur\'an problem asks for the maximum number of edges in a subgraph of a graph $G$ that does not contain a forbidden subgraph $H$. We consider the Tur\'an problem where $G$ is $Q_n$ and $H$ is a cycle of length $4k+2$ with $k\geq 3$. Confirming a conjecture of Erd{\H o}s (1984), we show that the ratio of the size of such a subgraph of $Q_n$ over the number of edges of $Q_n$ is $o(1)$, i.e. in the limit this ratio approaches 0 as $n$ approaches infinity