We prove geometric Ramsey-type statements on collections of lines in 3-space.
These statements give guarantees on the size of a clique or an independent set
in (hyper)graphs induced by incidence relations between lines, points, and
reguli in 3-space. Among other things, we prove that: (1) The intersection
graph of n lines in R^3 has a clique or independent set of size Omega(n^{1/3}).
(2) Every set of n lines in R^3 has a subset of n^{1/2} lines that are all
stabbed by one line, or a subset of Omega((n/log n)^{1/5}) such that no
6-subset is stabbed by one line. (3) Every set of n lines in general position
in R^3 has a subset of Omega(n^{2/3}) lines that all lie on a regulus, or a
subset of Omega(n^{1/3}) lines such that no 4-subset is contained in a regulus.
The proofs of these statements all follow from geometric incidence bounds --
such as the Guth-Katz bound on point-line incidences in R^3 -- combined with
Tur\'an-type results on independent sets in sparse graphs and hypergraphs.
Although similar Ramsey-type statements can be proved using existing generic
algebraic frameworks, the lower bounds we get are much larger than what can be
obtained with these methods. The proofs directly yield polynomial-time
algorithms for finding subsets of the claimed size.
Comment: 18 pages including appendix
Characterization and recognition of P4-sparse graphs partitionable into k independent sets and ℓ cliques
