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A Canonical Ramsey Theorem for Exactly m-Coloured Complete Subgraphs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 October 2013

TEERADEJ KITTIPASSORN  and
BHARGAV P. NARAYANAN
TEERADEJ KITTIPASSORN
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Memphis, Memphis, TN 38152, USA (e-mail: t.kittipassorn@memphis.edu)
BHARGAV P. NARAYANAN
Affiliation:
Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, University of Cambridge, Wilberforce Road, Cambridge CB3 0WB, UK (e-mail: b.p.narayanan@dpmms.cam.ac.uk)
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Abstract

Given an edge colouring of a graph with a set of m colours, we say that the graph is exactly m-coloured if each of the colours is used. We consider edge colourings of the complete graph on $\mathbb{N}$ with infinitely many colours and show that either one can find an exactly m-coloured complete subgraph for every natural number m or there exists an infinite subset X ⊂ $\mathbb{N}$ coloured in one of two canonical ways: either the colouring is injective on X or there exists a distinguished vertex v in X such that X\{v} is 1-coloured and each edge between v and X\{v} has a distinct colour (all different to the colour used on X\{v}). This answers a question posed by Stacey and Weidl in 1999. The techniques that we develop also enable us to resolve some further questions about finding exactly m-coloured complete subgraphs in colourings with finitely many colours.

Keywords

Primary 05C55Secondary 05C63
Type
Paper
Information
Combinatorics, Probability and Computing , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , January 2014 , pp. 102 - 115
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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