Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2017 iii Paper 130 4 ii Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-05
The dynamical proof of Hindman's theorem gives the following result. The Hindman theorem asserts that every finite coloring of the positive integers admits an infinite strictly increasing sequence for which all nonempty finite sums of distinct terms have one color. We will in fact arrange , so all these sums also have unique representations.
Extend the given coloring arbitrarily to a point , retaining the prescribed colors at every positive coordinate. Let be its forward orbit closure under the left shift. The product topology makes a compact metric space, and the left shift is a continuous map. There is a nonempty minimal subsystem : order the nonempty closed forward-invariant subsets by reverse inclusion, use compactness and the finite intersection property to intersect any chain, and apply the Zorn lemma. Minimality also implies . The result permitted in the question now supplies a minimal point proximal to .
We need the joint return lemma for a proximal minimal pair, which we prove here. It suffices to consider an open neighborhood of in . Choose an open neighborhood of with . Every forward orbit in meets , and a finite subcover of on supplies a bound on the needed return index. For a compatible metric , choose smaller than the distance from to when the latter is nonempty. By uniform continuity of the finitely many maps , , some ensuresProximality supplies arbitrarily large with . To see that the times can be large under the definition using an infimum over , either , in which case this is automatic, or injectivity of the left shift makes every finite collection of distances strictly positive, so a sufficiently smaller proximal distance occurs beyond that collection. Some has . Then also. Hence arbitrarily large positive satisfyThis uses the minimal point property for bounded returns and proximality for closeness; closeness alone would not guarantee a return near .
Put . Inductively, let , where denotes the finite-sums set, and maintainThe initial condition at is just ; no condition on is required. The cylinder set is a neighborhood of . Use the proved joint return lemma to choose with both and in . All new sums belong to , and the old sums remain in , so both inductive conditions persist. Every nonzero sum is positive, where agrees with the original coloring. ThereforeThis proves the Hindman theorem using only the permitted proximal-minimal existence result and the compactness and return arguments supplied above.