On the staircases of Gy\'arf\'as

Abstract

Gy\'arf\'as investigated a geometric Ramsey problem on convex, separated, balanced, geometric $K_{n,n}$. This led to appealing extremal problem on square $0$-$1$ matrices. Gy\'arf\'as conjectured that any $0$-$1$ matrix of size $n\times n$ has a staircase of size $n-1$. We introduce the non-symmetric version of Gy\'arf\'as' problem. We give upper bounds and in certain range matching lower bound on the corresponding extremal function. In the square/balanced case we improve the $(4/5+\epsilon)n$ lower bound of Cai, Gy\'arf\'as et al. to $5n/6-7/12$. We settle the problem when instead of considering maximum staircases we deal with the sum of the size of the longest $0$- and $1$-staircases.