The minimal density of triangles in tripartite graphs

Abstract

We determine the minimal density of triangles in a tripartite graph with prescribed edge densities. This extends a previous result of Bondy, Shen, Thomassé and Thomassen characterizing those edge densities guaranteeing the existence of a triangle in a tripartite graph. To be precise we show that a suitably weighted copy of the graph formed by deleting a certain 9-cycle from $K_{3,3,3}$ has minimal triangle density among all weighted tripartite graphs with prescribed edge densities.