Now assign a color to every number in a collection. Pick several colors: red, blue and yellow, for example. When Ramsey theorists talk about splitting up a set of numbers, they often use the language of coloring. They then find ways to prove that certain structures are inevitable, even if you try to avoid creating them by breaking or slicing in a clever way. They might break apart big sets of numbers like the integers or the fractions, or slice up the connections between points on a network. Last fall he did, when he and his adviser, Marcin Sabok, posted a major advance in the field known as Ramsey theory.įor almost a century, Ramsey theorists have been gathering evidence that mathematical structure persists in hostile circumstances.
Bowen was sure that his scores didn’t reflect his mathematical skills, and he resolved to prove it. “I took my qualifying exams and did absolutely horribly on them,” he said. in mathematics at McGill University, Matt Bowen had a problem.
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