Canonical arithmetic progression dichotomy
ID: canonical-arithmetic-progression-dichotomy
Every colouring of the positive integers, even with infinitely many colours, has an arithmetic progression of any prescribed finite length on which the colouring is constant or injective. Encode a progression by the equivalence relation of equality of its colours. This gives a finite colouring of its starting point and step. A Gallai theorem for an integer lattice copy of a suitable two-dimensional pattern makes either all indices inequivalent, or one equal-colour pair range independently over two whole progressions. In the second case, one of those progressions is monochromatic.
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