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Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.

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Claim. For every graph HH on at most four vertices there is c=c(H)>0c=c(H)>0 such that every HH-free graph on nn vertices has a clique or an independent set of size at least ncn^c, where HH-free means that no induced subgraph is isomorphic to HH. The result is in P. Erdős and A. Hajnal, Ramsey-type theorems, Discrete Appl. Math. 25 (1989), no. 1--2, 37--52, the paper that states the conjecture of Problem 61. The statement here follows two later papers' accounts of it: Nguyen, Scott and Seymour's Induced subgraph density. VII (p. 1) says that Erdős and Hajnal themselves proved the conjecture for all graphs with at most four vertices, and Chudnovsky and Safra's bull-free paper (Section 1) reports the conjecture as known for ∣V(H)∣≤4|V(H)|\le4 and for the graphs obtained from these by certain operations. The same paper proves, for every HH, a clique or independent set of size at least exp⁡(cHlog⁡n)\exp(c_H\sqrt{\log n}), the bound the site's commentary credits to it; that bound settles no instance of the question and is recorded on the problem page.

Covers. Every HH with at most four vertices: the instances of the question for those HH. The problem stays open, since the conjecture is a statement about every HH.

Depends on. Nothing in this wiki.

Acceptance. The paper is a refereed publication in Discrete Applied Mathematics, in the issue of October 1989 (the day is not recorded, and this page's date is the first of that month), which is the refereed evidence. The site's commentary credits the cases to the paper, but the site labels the problem OPEN, so no reviewed evidence is listed. This corpus has not checked the proof.