The name of Frank Ramsey is universally known amongst combinatorial mathematicians, but our casual mental picture of him can easily be an unimpressive one – the man who almost stumbled across the theorem that now bears his name, thereby anticipating Erdős and Szekeres, who of course gave the proper proof. Such an idea of Ramsey is entirely false: he was an absolutely brilliant man, who would certainly have become even more famous had he not died so young, and who would surely, it could easily be argued, have made yet further remarkable contributions to philosophy, economics and logic – and to combinatorics.

For a graph H and an integer n, the Turán number is the maximum possible number of edges in a simple graph on n vertices that contains no copy of H. H is r-degenerate if every one of its subgraphs contains a vertex of degree at most r. We prove that, for any fixed bipartite graph H in which all degrees in one colour class are at most r, . This is tight for all values of r and can also be derived from an earlier result of Füredi. We also show that there is an absolute positive constant c such that, for every fixed bipartite r-degenerate graph H, This is motivated by a conjecture of Erdős that asserts that, for every such H,

For two graphs G and H, the Ramsey number is the minimum number n such that, in any colouring of the edges of the complete graph on n vertices by red and blue, there is either a red copy of G or a blue copy of H. Erdős conjectured that there is an absolute constant c such that, for any graph G with m edges, . Here we prove this conjecture for bipartite graphs G, and prove that for general graphs G with m edges, for some absolute positive constant c.

These results and some related ones are derived from a simple and yet surprisingly powerful lemma, proved, using probabilistic techniques, at the beginning of the paper. This lemma is a refined version of earlier results proved and applied by various researchers including Rödl, Kostochka, Gowers and Sudakov.

A subgraph H in an edge-colouring is properly coloured if incident edges of H are assigned different colours, and H is rainbow if no two edges of H are assigned the same colour. We study properly coloured subgraphs and rainbow subgraphs forced in edge-colourings of complete graphs in which each vertex is incident to a large number of colours.

We show that the constant colourings and the one-to-one colourings are insufficient for a canonical version of a certain theorem in Ramsey theory.

We study the following one-person game against a random graph process: the Player's goal is to 2-colour a random sequence of edges of a complete graph on n vertices, avoiding a monochromatic triangle for as long as possible. The game is over when a monochromatic triangle is created. The online version of the game requires that the Player should colour each edge as it comes, before looking at the next edge.

While it is not hard to prove that the expected length of this game is about , the proof of the upper bound suggests the following relaxation: instead of colouring online, the random graph is generated in only two rounds, and the Player colours the edges of the first round before the edges of the second round are thrown in. Given the size of the first round, how many edges can there be in the second round for the Player to be likely to win? In the extreme case, when the first round consists of a random graph with edges, where c is a positive constant, we show that the Player can win with high probability only if constantly many edges are generated in the second round.

We consider analogues of van der Waerden's theorem and Szemerédi's theorem, where arithmetic progressions are replaced by binary trees with a fixed distance between successive vertices. The proofs are based on some novel recurrence properties for Markov processes.

In a previous paper we found a relation between the ranks of co-diagonal matrices (matrices with zeroes in their diagonal and nonzeroes elsewhere) and the quality of explicit Ramsey graph constructions. We also gave a construction based on the BBR polynomial of Barrington, Beigel and Rudich. In the present work we give another construction for low-rank co-diagonal matrices, based on a modular sieve formula.

A finite or infinite matrix A with rational entries is called partition regular if, whenever the natural numbers are finitely coloured, there is a monochromatic vector x with . Many of the classical theorems of Ramsey Theory may naturally be interpreted as assertions that particular matrices are partition regular.

While in the finite case partition regularity is well understood, very little is known in the infinite case. Our aim in this paper is to present some of the natural and appealing open problems in the area.

Given a positive integer n and a family of graphs, let denote the maximum number of colours in an edge-colouring of such that no subgraph of belonging to has distinct colours on its edges. Erdös, Simonovits and Sós [6] conjectured for fixed k with that . This has been proved for . For general k, in this paper we improve the previous bound of to . For even k, we further improve it to . We also prove that , which is sharp.

The van der Waerden theorem in Ramsey theory states that, for every k and t and sufficiently large N, every k-colouring of [N] contains a monochromatic arithmetic progression of length t. Motivated by this result, Radoičić conjectured that every equinumerous 3-colouring of [3n] contains a 3-term rainbow arithmetic progression, i.e., an arithmetic progression whose terms are coloured with distinct colours. In this paper, we prove that every 3-colouring of the set of natural numbers for which each colour class has density more than 1/6, contains a 3-term rainbow arithmetic progression. We also prove similar results for colourings of . Finally, we give a general perspective on other anti-Ramsey-type problems that can be considered.

If φ is a scattered order type, and μ is a cardinal, then there exists a scattered order type ψ such that holds.

The Ramsey number, , of a graph G is the minimum integer N such that, in every 2-colouring of the edges of the complete graph on N vertices, there is a monochromatic copy of G. In 1975, Burr and Erdős posed a problem on Ramsey numbers of d-degenerate graphs, i.e., graphs in which every subgraph has a vertex of degree at most d. They conjectured that for every d there exists a constant c(d) such that for any d-degenerate graph G of order n.

In this paper we prove that for each such G. In fact, we show that, for every , sufficiently large n, and any graph H of order , either H or its complement contains a (d,n)-common graph, that is, a graph in which every set of d vertices has at least n common neighbours. It is easy to see that any (d,n)-common graph contains every d-degenerate graph G of order n. We further show that, for every constant C, there is an n and a graph H of order such that neither H nor its complement contains a -common graph.

A classical result of Sárközy states that, for any and any positive density subset E of , there exist elements x and y of E and such that . A version of this result for finite fields is derived from a recent theorem of P. Larick, a short proof of which is also given.

Given a graph Hwith no isolates, the (generalized) mixed Ramsey number is the smallest integer r such that every H-free graph of order r contains an m-element irredundant set. We consider some questions concerning the asymptotic behaviour of this number (i) with H fixed and , (ii) with m fixed and a sequence of dense graphs, in particular for the sequence . Open problems are mentioned throughout the paper.

We consider the k-party communication complexity of the problem of determining if a word w is of the form , for fixed letters . Using the well-known theorem of Hindman (a Ramsey-type result about finite subsets of natural numbers), we prove that for and 5 the communication complexity of the problem increases with the length of the word w.

Let σ be a finite relational signature, let be a set of finite complete relational structures of signature σ, and let be the countable homogeneous relational structure of signature σ which does not embed any of the structures in .

When σ consists of at most binary relations and is finite, the vertex partition behaviour of is completely analysed, in the sense that it is shown that a canonical partition exists and the size of this partition in terms of the structures in is determined. If is infinite some results are obtained, but a complete analysis is still missing.

Some general results are presented which are intended to be used in further investigations when σ contains relational symbols of arity larger than two or when the set of bounds is infinite.