Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Unbounded quotient coloring and the colored lifting obligation
Standing
Let , , and let be the integer span of the full axis-line indicators. The line family itself is uniformly extracting when . Its dissociated coloring growth remains unproved. This page gives a positive, quantitatively unbounded coloring statement in a quotient, and states exactly what must be lifted to use it.
1. The integral quotient is a full simplex tensor
Put and . There is a natural integral isomorphism
Indeed is primitive and , where is generated by all but one standard basis vector. Tensor expansion splits off every summand with a factor; their sum is exactly . The complementary summand proves (1) over , as well as saturation of .
The projected point vectors , indexed by , are exactly the columns of
Each factor consists of the standard basis images with their sole relation that their sum is zero. For these indexed columns are nonzero and distinct, with no antipodal pairs.
2. Linear sides force unbounded coloring in the quotient
Take . Write
The small-column counting lemma from the tensor schedule analysis gives
In particular .
Here is the finite argument, to make the coefficient requirement explicit. In standard simplex coordinates the average logarithmic column -norm is . At least half the columns have norm at most . If a proper -coloring existed, one class would contain of them. Its subset sums would be distinct, with total coordinate width at most . Thus
The elementary bound , for , gives , proving the strict first inequality in (3). Finally .
Consequently, for every fixed finite , every -coloring of the point set of a sufficiently large box has a nonzero vector
The quotient relation has genuinely ternary coefficients, not merely bounded rational denominators. Membership in follows integrally from (1); it does not bound coefficients of a line representation.
3. Exact missing colored lift
In a one-coordinate extension, let be the old lines of color in layer , and the points whose new-axis line has color . The exact extension criterion needs a nonzero vector
Equation (4) supplies a vector in the larger set . It does not supply (5). There are two separate gaps:
- An integral preimage under the full line matrix need not be known to have every coefficient in .
- Even a flat preimage in the full line family need not use the correct actual color, much less give one in each layer's correct color class.
The first obligation is proved without color constraints in at most three directions, by the integer graph-gauge theorem. It is not proved in arbitrary dimension. The second obligation remains even in settings where an unrestricted flat preimage exists.
The second gap is sharp. Existential colored lifting from common real spans holds in two directions, but is false in three: an explicit independent twelve-line class has a nonzero flat image on five points and no nonzero ternary sum on that point support. This rules out replacing (5) by real-span membership alone. A successful argument must use further structure from the joint coloring, not just independence of its individual classes.
Neither saturation nor the quotient coloring bound permits silently replacing by the intersection in (5). No general colored lifting theorem is asserted here.
The simple quotient identification and the finite counting argument are algebraic. No computation is used in (1)--(4). This is not an unbounded coloring theorem for the original line configuration.