On the Ramsey numbers of wheels, cycles, and stars

Abstract

The wheel $W_k$ is the graph on $k+1$ vertices consisting of a vertex joined to a cycle of length $k$, and we say that $W_k$ is an even wheel if $k$ is even. Mao, Wang, Magnant, Schiermeyer proved that the Ramsey number of $W_{2n}$ is between $4n+1$ and $12n-2$. We improve both of these bounds, showing that $5n-\frac{1+(-1{)}^n}{2}\le R(W_{2n})\le 8n+664$ for all integers $n\ge 2$. The main focus of the paper concerns two general results on the Ramsey numbers of stars versus even wheels and even cycles versus even wheels, from which the above bounds are obtained as a corollary. That is, we asymptotically determine $R(K_{1,m},W_{2n})$ and $R(C_{2m},W_{2n})$ for all sufficiently large $m$ and $n$, both of which were open problems for most regimes. As for odd wheels, we note that the analogous values for stars versus odd wheels and odd cycles versus odd wheels were already known exactly, from which it follows that $6n+4=R(K_{1,2n+1},W_{2n+1})\le R(W_{2n+1})\le 2\cdot R(C_{2n+1},W_{2n+1})=12n+2$. Very recently, Zhang and Chen improved the upper bound to $R(W_{2n+1})\le \frac{32n}{3}+O(1)$. We are able to refine their proof, further improving the upper bound to $R(W_{2n+1})\le 10n+O(1)$.

(v2) Updated on account of arXiv:2604.13850. 29 pages, 3 figures; (v1) 27 pages, 3 figures