recent advance in geometry makes heavy use of Ramsey’s theorem, an important idea in another field—graph theory. Ramsey’s theorem states that in any graph where all points are connected by either red lines or blue lines, you’re guaranteed to have a large subset of the graph that is completely uniform—that is, either all red or all blue.
Equivalently, you can go the other way: Pick how big you want your uniform subset to be. Ramsey’s theorem states that somewhere out there there’s a graph in which a subset of that size must arise.
It’s not obvious why this is true. Why can’t there be a graph where lines of different colors remain completely jumbled together?
I put this question to Jonathan Jedwab, a mathematician at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. He responded with this example, which provides a graphical intuition for why the theorem is true.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
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