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Ashwin Sah just proved a new upper bound to diagonal Ramsey numbers. See his preprint on the arXiv. This is the first improvement since Conlon’s upper bound published in Annals of Math in 2009, which in turn built on earlier work of Thomason (1988).

Obtaining asymptotics of Ramsey numbers is perhaps the central open problem of Ramsey theory in combinatorics. Research on this problem had led us to a lot of new mathematics that have proven to be useful elsewhere. Most notably, Erdős’ proof of a lower bound to Ramsey numbers (1947) initiated the probabilistic method, by now an indispensable method in combinatorics.

Ashwin’s improvement relies on new insights into graph quasirandomness properties.

Congratulations Ashwin! This is an impressive accomplishment.

Ashwin had just finished his undergraduate studies at MIT. I’m happy that he will be staying at MIT for his PhD. Ashwin already has an impressive list of papers. I had previously mentioned Ashwin on this blog reporting on our joint work (together with Mehtaab Sawhney and David Stoner) on our work on independent sets and the reverse Sidorenko inequality.

• Mehtaab Sawhney wins Clay Research Fellowship 1/25/2024
• Papers by MIT combinatorialists—Fall 2023 12/22/2023
• Schildkraut: Equiangular lines and large multiplicity of fixed second eigenvalue 3/6/2023
• Nearly all k-SAT functions are unate 9/19/2022
• Kwan–Sah–Sawhney–Simkin: High-girth Steiner triple systems 1/13/2022
• Graphs with high second eigenvalue multiplicity 9/28/2021
• Enumerating k-SAT functions 7/21/2021
• Mathematical tools for large graphs 7/12/2021
• How I manage my BibTeX references, and why I prefer not initializing first names 7/4/2021
• The cylindrical width of transitive sets 1/28/2021
• Ashwin Sah and Mehtaab Sawhney win the Morgan Prize 10/29/2020
• Jain–Sah–Sawhney: Singularity of discrete random matrices 10/13/2020
• Gunby: Upper tails for random regular graphs 10/5/2020
• Joints of varieties 9/12/2020
• Ashwin Sah's new diagonal Ramsey number upper bound 5/20/2020
• Joints tightened 11/21/2019
• Equiangular lines with a fixed angle 7/30/2019
• Impartial digraphs 6/27/2019
• A reverse Sidorenko inequality 9/26/2018
• The number of independent sets in an irregular graph 5/12/2018