Van der Waerden's Theorem

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Van der Waerden's theorem states that for positive integers and there exists an integer such that any -coloring of the integers contains a monochromatic arithmetic progression (MAP) of length . The current best-known bounds on are large power towers; very few specific values are known. After seeding a random coloring, you can click a number to cycle through other colors. See if you can find a 3-coloring of 1 through 26 with no MAP of length 3, thus showing . What about extremal colorings for , , and ?

Contributed by: Benjamin Shemmer (December 2013)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA


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