Solution Regularity of k-partite Linear Systems -- A Variant of Rado's Theorem

Abstract

A classical question in combinatorial number theory asks whether an equation has a solution inside a particular subset of its domain. The Rado's Theorem gives a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for a systems of linear equations to have a monochromatic solution whenever the positive integers are finitely colored. In this paper, we provide a variant of this theorem. For $k\ge 2$, we present conditions such that, when the set of variables is partitioned into $k$ subsets, there is a solution such that the variables of each subset are monochromatic, which we call a semi-monochromatic solution. We adopt the smod $p$ coloring by Graham, Rothschild, and Spencer but turn the existence of semi-monochromatic solution into the existence of common roots of linear polynomials. With this idea, one can further generalize the theorem to systems of linear equations over general algebraic number fields.