English

Decomposing the real line into Borel sets closed under addition

Logic 2014-11-26 v2

Abstract

We consider decompositions of the real line into pairwise disjoint Borel pieces so that each piece is closed under addition. How many pieces can there be? We prove among others that the number of pieces is either at most 3 or uncountable, and we show that it is undecidable in ZFCZFC and even in the theory ZFC+c=ω2ZFC + \mathfrak{c} = \omega_2 if the number of pieces can be uncountable but less than the continuum. We also investigate various versions: what happens if we drop the Borelness requirement, if we replace addition by multiplication, if the pieces are subgroups, if we partition (0,)(0,\infty), and so on.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1406.0701,
  title  = {Decomposing the real line into Borel sets closed under addition},
  author = {Márton Elekes and Tamás Keleti},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1406.0701},
  year   = {2014}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T04:29:25.198Z