Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 August 2010
We determine the minimal density of triangles in a tripartite graph with prescribed edge densities. This extends a previous result of Bondy, Shen, Thomassé and Thomassen characterizing those edge densities guaranteeing the existence of a triangle in a tripartite graph. To be precise we show that a suitably weighted copy of the graph formed by deleting a certain 9-cycle from K3,3,3 has minimal triangle density among all weighted tripartite graphs with prescribed edge densities.