Browsing by Author "Stowe, William"

Is it possible to color R^2 with 2 colors in such a way that the vertices of any unit equilateral triangle are not all the same color. This thesis seeks to answer questions of this kind in the field of Euclidean Ramsey Theory. We begin by defining that a finite configuration A is k-Ramsey in R^n if any k-coloring of R^n has a monochromatic set that is congruent to A. We both prove and disprove this property for various configurations, dimensions, and numbers of colors. This includes a discussion of the problem of finding the chromatic number of the plane, and the connection of k-Ramsey problems to immersion of unit distance graphs. We then attempt to generalize this property to different equivalence relations other than congruence and study how this affects which configurations are guaranteed monochromatic. Following from the Hales-Jewett Theorem, this line of inquiry peaks with a discussion of Gallai’s Theorem, which says that translation and scaling form a sufficient set of group actions to guarantee all configurations k-Ramsey for any k, in any dimension. We then turn our attention to the property of Ramsey-ness. A configuration A is said to be Ramsey if for any number of colors k, there exists a dimension n such that A is k-Ramsey in R^n . We show that if a configuration is Ramsey, then it must be embeddable in the surface of a sphere of some dimension. Further, we show that any brick, the Cartesian product of intervals, is Ramsey, and thus any subset of a brick is Ramsey. Finally, we prove that any triangle configuration is Ramsey.