Combinatorics – Proving a Monochromatic Rectangle Exists in a Colored Grid

coloringcombinatorics

I have a $3$-coloring of $\mathbb{Z}\times\mathbb{Z}$, i.e. a function $f:\mathbb{Z}\times\mathbb{Z}\to\{\color{red}{\text{red}},\color{green}{\text{green}},\color{blue}{\text{blue}}\}$.

I have to prove that there is a monochromatic rectangle with its sides being parallel to the axis, i.e. to prove that for some choice of $a,b,c,d\in\mathbb{Z}$ with $a\neq b$ and $c\neq d$, all the points $(a,c),(a,d),(b,c),(b,d)\,$ have the same color.

I tried to work by contradiction, without achieving much.

Additionally, can we prove some upper bound on $|a-b|$ and $|c-d|$?

Best Answer

Such a rectangle will occur in a grid of $19$ columns by $4$ rows.

By the pigeonhole principle, each column must have a repeated colour point. Ignoring any later repeats, classify the columns according to the first two repeat colour positions; there are $6$ options: $(1,2), (1,3), (1,4), (2, 3), (2, 4)$ and $(3,4)$. So since there are also $3$ colour options for the repeated colours there are only $6\times3=18$ different options for repeated colour by position. Therefore, by the pigeonhole principle again, in a $19\times 4$ grid we must have a suitable rectangle with identically coloured corners.


From an observation by Pere in comments:

For $n$ colours, using the same approach, we would adopt a grid of $(n+1)$ rows and then require $n{n+1 \choose 2}+1 = n(n+1)n/2 +1 = (n^3+n^2)/2 + 1$ columns to find a rectangle with same-coloured corners.

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