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Saturday, May 24, 2014

Ramsey theory

Ramsey theory is a fascinating subfield of combinatorics.  It deals with the idea that you can find always find regular substructures in large enough arbitrary, not necessarily regular, structures.  It can be considered a generalization of the Pigeonhole Principle.  A simple case of the general Ramsey's theorem is the following statement: among any group of 6 people, there is either a group of 3 people who mutually know each other, or there is a group of 3 people who mutually do not know each other.  Couched in graph theory, this is equivalent to the statement that for any 2-coloring of of the complete graph on 6 vertices K6, there exists a subgraph of 3 vertices that is monochromatic, i.e. all the edges in the subgraph are colored with the same color.

For this simple case, the proof is quite easy. Pick a person A from the group.  If A has 3 or more friends, pick 3 of them, say B,C and D.  If 2 people among these friends are friends with each other, then together with A they would form a group of 3 mutual friends.  Otherwise B,C and D mutually do not know each other.
If A has 2 or less friends, then there are at least 3 people who A does not know and you have a similar argument.  Pick 3 among them, if they are not mutual friends, then there are 2 of them who are not friends, then these 2 people along with A form a group who mutually do not know each other.

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