An Unsure Note on an Un-Schur Problem

  • Olaf Parczyk
  • Christoph Spiegel

Abstract

Graham, Rödl, and Ruciński originally posed the problem of determining the minimum number of monochromatic Schur triples that must appear in any 2-coloring of the first n integers. This question was subsequently resolved independently by Datskovsky, Schoen, and Robertson and Zeilberger. Here we suggest studying a natural anti-Ramsey variant of this question and establish the first non-trivial bounds by proving that the maximum fraction of Schur triples that can be rainbow in a given 3-coloring of the first n integers is at least 0.4 and at most 0.66364. We conjecture the lower bound to be tight. This question is also motivated by a famous analogous problem in graph theory due to Erdős and Sós regarding the maximum number of rainbow triangles in any 3-coloring of Kn, which was settled by Balogh et al..

Published
2026-03-13
How to Cite
Parczyk, O., & Spiegel, C. (2026). An Unsure Note on an Un-Schur Problem. The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, 33(1), P1.45. https://doi.org/10.37236/13554
Article Number
P1.45