Independence for partition regular equations

Abstract

A matrix A is said to be partition regular ( PR) over a subset S of the positive integers if whenever S is finitely coloured, there exists a vector x, with all elements in the same colour class in S, which satisfies A x = 0 . We also say that S is PR for A. Many of the classical theorems of Ramsey Theory, such as van der Waerden's theorem and Schur's theorem, may naturally be interpreted as statements about partition regularity. Those matrices which are partition regular over the positive integers were completely characterised by Rado in 1933. Given matrices A and B, we say that A Rado-dominates B if any set which is PR for A is also PR for B. One trivial way for this to happen is if every solution to A x = 0 actually contains a solution to B y = 0 . Bergelson, Hindman and Leader conjectured that this is the only way in which one matrix can Rado-dominate another. In this paper, we prove this conjecture for the first interesting case, namely for 1 × 3 matrices. We also show that, surprisingly, the conjecture is not true in general.