Problem #582: Does there exist a graph $G$ which contains no $K_4$, and...

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Progress

Erdős and Hajnal [ErHa67] first asked for the existence of any such graph. Existence was proved by Folkman [Fo70], but with very poor quantitative bounds. (As a result these quantities are often called Folkman numbers.) Let this particular Folkman number be denoted by $N$.

Frankl and Rödl [FrRo86] proved $N\leq 7\times 10^{11}$, which Spencer [Sp88] improved to $\leq 3\times 10^{9}$. This resolved the challenge of Erdős [Er75d] to find such a graph with less than $10^{10}$ vertices.

Lu [Lu07] proved $N\leq 9697$ vertices. The current record is due to Dudek and Rödl [DuRo08] who proved $N\leq 941$ vertices. For further information we refer to a paper of Radziszowski and Xu [RaXu07], who prove that $N\geq 19$ and speculate that $N\leq 127$.

See also the entry in the graphs problem collection and [924] for the general case.