Canonizing structural Ramsey theorems

Abstract

At the beginning of 1950s Erdős and Rado suggested the investigation of the Ramsey-type results where the number of colors is not finite. This marked the birth of the so-called canonizing Ramsey theory. In 1985 Prömel and Voigt made the first step towards the structural canonizing Ramsey theory when they proved the canonical Ramsey property for the class of finite linearly ordered hypergraphs, and the subclasses thereof defined by forbidden substructures. Building on their results in this paper we provide several new structural canonical Ramsey results. We prove the canonical Ramsey theorem for the class of all finite linearly ordered tournaments, the class of all finite posets with linear extensions and the class of all finite linearly ordered metric spaces. We conclude the paper with the canonical version of the celebrated Nešetřil–Rödl Theorem. In contrast to the “classical” Ramsey-theoretic approach, in this paper we advocate the use of category theory to manage the complexity of otherwise technically overwhelming proofs typical in canonical Ramsey theory.