Canonical Ramsey: triangles, rectangles and beyond

Abstract

In a seminal work, Cheng and Xu showed that if $S$ is a square or a triangle with a certain property, then for every positive integer $r$ there exists $n_0(S)$ independent of $r$ such that every $r$-coloring of ${\mathbb{E}}^n$ with $n\ge n_0(S)$ contains a monochromatic or a rainbow congruent copy of $S$. Gehér, Sagdeev, and Tóth formalized this dimension independence as the canonical Ramsey property and proved it for all hypercubes, thereby covering rectangles whose squared aspect ratio $(a/b{)}^2$ is rational. They asked whether this property holds for all triangles and for all rectangles. (1) We resolve both questions. More precisely, for triangles we confirm the property in ${\mathbb{E}}^4$ by developing a novel rotation-sphereical chaining argument. For rectangles, we introduce a structural reduction to product configurations of bounded color complexity, enabling the use of the simplex Ramsey theorem together with product Ramsey theorem. (2) Beyond this, we develop a concise perturbation framework based on an iterative embedding coupled with the Frankl-Rödl simplex super-Ramsey theorem, which yields the canonical Ramsey property for a natural class of 3-dimensional simplices and also furnishes an alternative proof for triangles.

27 pages, 8 figures. Supersedes arXiv:2508.02465. The results of the earlier preprint (by three of the authors) have been merged into the present manuscript, and the earlier preprint will not be published separately