New York Number Theory Seminar
February 20, 2003, 3:30 PM in Room 5417

Speaker:
Mel Nathanson (CUNY Lehman College)
Title:
Generalized additive bases, Konig's lemma, and the Erdos-Turan conjecture
Abstract:
This paper introduces a new class of additive bases and a genaral additive problem, a special case of which is the Erdos-Turan conjecture that the representation function of a basis of order 2 cannot be bounded. Konig's lemma on the existence of infinite paths in certain graphs is used to prove that the general additive problem for infinite sets is equaivalent to a related problem about finite sets. Other new results about the representation functions of additive bases will also be discussed.