alternate proof of Mantel’s theorem
Let be a triangle-free graph of order . For each edge of we consider theneighbourhoods (http://planetmath.org/NeighborhoodOfAVertex) and of .Since is triangle-free, these are disjoint.
This is only possible if the sum of the degrees of and is lessthan or equal to . So for each edge we get the inequality
Summing these inequalities for all edges of gives us
(The left hand side is a sum of where each edge incident with contributes one term and their are such edges.)
Since , we get and applying the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality gives.
So we conclude that for a triangle-free graph ,