English

Irreducibility over the Max-Min Semiring

Combinatorics 2021-12-06 v2 Number Theory

Abstract

For sets A,BNA, B\subset \mathbb N, their sumset is A+B:={a+b:aA,bB}A + B := \{a+b: a\in A, b\in B\}. If we cannot write a set CC as C=A+BC = A+B with A,B2|A|, |B|\geq 2, then we say that CC is irreducible\textit{irreducible}. The question of whether a given set CC is irreducible arises naturally in additive combinatorics. Equivalently, we can formulate this question as one about the irreducibility of boolean polynomials, which has been discussed in previous work by K. H. Kim and F. W. Roush (2005) and Y. Shitov (2014). We prove results about the irreducibility of polynomials and power series over the max-min semiring, a natural generalization of the boolean polynomials. We use combinatorial and probabilistic methods to prove that almost all polynomials are irreducible over the max-min semiring, generalizing work of Y. Shitov (2014) and proving a 2011 conjecture by D. L. Applegate, M. Le Brun, and N. J. A. Sloane. Furthermore, we use measure-theoretic methods and apply Borel's result on normal numbers to prove that almost all power series are asymptotically irreducible over the max-min semiring. This result generalizes work of E. Wirsing (1953).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2111.09786,
  title  = {Irreducibility over the Max-Min Semiring},
  author = {Benjamin Baily and Justine Dell and Henry L. Fleischmann and Faye Jackson and Steven J. Miller and Ethan Pesikoff and Luke Reifenberg},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.09786},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

11 pages, 0 figures; fixed references

R2 v1 2026-06-24T07:43:45.419Z