4 ms·

Eight pages.

• kleiba 2y ago
  Oh, wow, I missed that.
• A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
  > those eight pages yielded impressive results. I'm not exaggerating when I say that this is the most wild understatement I've read all year. Or were they going for deadpan humor? Ramsey's responsible for the famous theory that bears his name. The core concept of Ramsey Theory is this: Regardless of how extensive and complex a system S is, and no matter how large a positive integer n is, it is possible to find a sufficiently large super system Q that includes S. In such a way, no matter how Q is colored using n colors, Q will always contain a monochromatic copy of S. So Ramsey Theory explores the mathematics of coloring, but it has exerted tremendous influence on 20th century mathematics more generally -- it works to elucidate a lot of notions surrounding infinite and finite sets. In fact, it's clearly among the most influential 20th century mathematical theories; Paul Erdős' storied career owed an awful lot to Ramsey, and Ramsey theory also inspired Ramsey's friend Ludwig Wittgenstein's work in analytic philosophy.