An Unsure Note on an Un-Schur Problem

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 $K_n$, which was settled by Balogh et al.

11 pages, 1 figure