Title: A journey through Van der Waerden's Theorem
Speaker: David Wilson, Rutgers University
Date: Wednesday, February 10, 2010 12:10pm
Location: Graduate Student Lounge, 7th Floor, Hill Center, Rutgers University, Busch Campus, Piscataway, NJ
Van der Waerden's Theorem is one of the "classical Ramsey Theorems" and concerns the existence of monochromatic arithmetic sequences in arbitrary colorings of the natural numbers. I will talk through a proof of the theorem before talking a little on bounds on the VdW numbers (including the pretty cool wow and ack functions) and finish by mentioning a recent result on a similar problem involving geometric progressions, with a little twist.