2013/04/03 by Gyárfás, András, Sárközy, Gábor N., Selkow, Stanley
#Combinatorics (math.CO) #FOS: Mathematics
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1304.0871
The typical problem in (generalized) Ramsey theory is to find the order of the largest monochromatic member of a family F (for example matchings, paths, cycles, connected subgraphs) that must be present in any edge coloring of a complete graph Kn with t colors. Another area is to find the minimum number of monochromatic members of F that partition or cover the vertex set of every edge colored complete graph. Here we propose a problem that connects these areas: for fixed positive integers s,t, at least how many vertices can be covered by the vertices of no more than s monochromatic members of F in every edge coloring of Kn with t colors. Several problems and conjectures are presented, among them a possible extension of a well-known result of Cockayne and Lorimer on monochromatic matchings for which we prove an initial step: in case of s=t-1 we determine how many vertices can be covered by s monochromatic matchings in every t-coloring of Kn.