Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Source: original paper, printed p. 532, Theorem 2.
Statement
Every red-blue coloring of has a red triangle with side lengths or a blue unit square. The blue square can be replaced by any rectangle with side lengths , where .
Full proof
If there is a red triangle with side lengths , we are done. Assume there is no such red triangle. If there is no red point, the blue conclusion is immediate. Otherwise choose a red point . If has no red unit neighbor, its unit sphere is entirely blue. That sphere contains the desired rectangle: after translating to zero, the four points
lie on it and form a rectangle with sides .
Otherwise choose a red point with . Let be the unit circles centered at in the planes perpendicular to . If a point on either circle were red, the points would form a red triangle with sides . Thus both circles are blue.
Choose unit vectors perpendicular to with . They exist in that two-dimensional perpendicular plane, since . Then
are blue and form a rectangle: one side is , the other is , they are perpendicular, and their lengths are . Taking gives the square.
If there is no red unit pair, in particular there is no red right unit triangle, so this proves the blue-square conclusion in dimension three. It does not establish the planar assertion in Problem 214.