English

The reverse mathematics of Hindman's theorem for sums of exactly two elements

Logic 2018-05-30 v3

Abstract

Hindman's Theorem (HT) states that for every coloring of N\mathbb N with finitely many colors, there is an infinite set HNH \subseteq \mathbb N such that all nonempty sums of distinct elements of HH have the same color. The investigation of restricted versions of HT from the computability-theoretic and reverse-mathematical perspectives has been a productive line of research recently. In particular, HTkn^{\leqslant n}_k is the restriction of HT to sums of at most nn many elements, with at most kk colors allowed, and HTk=n^{=n}_k is the restriction of HT to sums of \emph{exactly} nn many elements and kk colors. Even HT22^{\leqslant 2}_2 appears to be a strong principle, and may even imply HT itself over RCA0_0. In contrast, HT2=2^{=2}_2 is known to be strictly weaker than HT over RCA0_0, since HT2=2^{=2}_2 follows immediately from Ramsey's Theorem for 22-colorings of pairs. In fact, it was open for several years whether HT2=2^{=2}_2 is computably true. We show that HT2=2^{=2}_2 and similar results with addition replaced by subtraction and other operations are not provable in RCA0_0, or even WKL0_0. In fact, we show that there is a computable instance of HT2=2^{=2}_2 such that all solutions can compute a function that is diagonally noncomputable relative to \emptyset'. It follows that there is a computable instance of HT2=2^{=2}_2 with no Σ20\Sigma^0_2 solution, which is the best possible result with respect to the arithmetical hierarchy. Furthermore, a careful analysis of the proof of the result above about solutions DNC relative to \emptyset' shows that HT2=2^{=2}_2 implies RRT2=2^{=2}_2, the Rainbow Ramsey Theorem for 22-colorings of pairs, over RCA0_0. The most interesting aspect of our construction of computable colorings as above is the use of an effective version of the Lov\'asz Local Lemma due to Rumyantsev and Shen.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1804.09809,
  title  = {The reverse mathematics of Hindman's theorem for sums of exactly two elements},
  author = {Barbara F. Csima and Damir D. Dzhafarov and Denis R. Hirschfeldt and Carl G. Jockusch, and Reed Solomon and Linda Brown Westrick},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.09809},
  year   = {2018}
}