Erdős et al.'s conjecture on avoiding triangles in two-colored planes

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Let TT be a triangle in the Euclidean plane, and let a coloring be a partition of R2\mathbb{R}^2 into two color classes. A coloring contains TT if it has a monochromatic copy of TT obtained by translations and rotations; otherwise, it avoids TT. Let χ∗\chi^* be the coloring by alternating half-open horizontal strips of width 32\frac{\sqrt{3}}{2}, with a point (x,y)(x,y) black if and only if n3<y≤(n+12)3n\sqrt{3}<y\leq\left(n+\frac{1}{2}\right)\sqrt{3} for some integer nn. Erdős et al.'s conjecture. For every triangle TT and every coloring χ\chi, if χ\chi avoids TT, then TT is an equilateral (l,l,l)(l,l,l)-triangle and χ\chi is equal to an ll-times scaled copy of χ∗\chi^*, up to possible modifications of the colors of points on the boundary of the strips. The paper presents a counterexample to this conjecture and gives a broader class of colorings avoiding the unit triangle, so this conjecture is refuted.

References

Primary source

Vit Jelinek, Jan Kyncl, Rudolf Stolar and Tomas Valla, “Monochromatic triangles in two-colored plane”, arXiv:math/0701940 (2007).

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