Partition Theorems and Computability Theory By

The computability-theoretic and reverse mathematical aspects of various combinatorial principles, such as König’s Lemma and Ramsey’s Theorem, have received a great deal of attention and are active areas of research. We carry on this study of effective combinatorics by analyzing various partition theorems (such as Ramsey’s Theorem) with the aim of understanding the complexity of solutions to computable instances in terms of the Turing degrees and the arithmetical hierarchy. Our main focus is the study of the effective content of two partition theorems allowing infinitely many colors: the Canonical Ramsey Theorem of Erdös and Rado, and the Regressive Function Theorem of Kanamori and McAloon. Our results on the complexity of solutions rely heavily on a new, purely inductive, proof of the Canonical Ramsey Theorem. This study unearths some interesting relationships between these two partition theorems, Ramsey’s Theorem, and Konig’s Lemma, and these connections will be emphasized. We also study Ramsey degrees, i.e. those Turing degrees which are able to compute homogeneous sets for every computable 2-coloring of pairs of natural numbers, in an attempt to further understand the effective content of Ramsey’s Theorem for exponent 2. We establish some new results about these degrees, and obtain as a corollary the nonexistence of a “universal” computable 2-coloring of pairs of natural numbers.