Published March 2023 | Published
Journal Article Open

Off-diagonal book Ramsey numbers

  • 1. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 2. ROR icon Stanford University
  • 3. ROR icon Tel Aviv University

Abstract

The book graph B(k)_n consists of n copies of K_(k+1) joined along a common K_k. In the prequel to this paper, we studied the diagonal Ramsey number r(B(k)_n, B(k)_n. Here we consider the natural off-diagonal variant r(B(k)_cn, B(k)_n for fixed c ∈ (0,1]. In this more general setting, we show that an interesting dichotomy emerges: for very small c, a simple k-partite construction dictates the Ramsey function and all nearly-extremal colourings are close to being k-partite, while, for c bounded away from 0, random colourings of an appropriate density are asymptotically optimal and all nearly-extremal colourings are quasirandom. Our investigations also open up a range of questions about what happens for intermediate values of c.

Copyright and License

© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Acknowledgement

We are grateful to the anonymous referee for helpful comments which improved the presentation of this paper.

Funding

Research supported by NSF Award DMS-2054452.
Research supported by a Packard Fellowship and by NSF Awards DMS-1800053 and DMS-2154169.
Research supported by NSF GRFP Grant DGE-1656518, NSF-BSF Grant 20196, and by ERC Consolidator Grants 863438 and 101044123.

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Created:
September 8, 2025
Modified:
September 8, 2025