Purely finitely additive measures are non-constructible objects

The existence of a purely finitely additive measure cannot be proved in Zermelo-Frankel set theory if the use of the Axiom of Choice is disallowed.Finitely additive probabilities; Charges; Axiom of choice; Constructivism.

Combinatorial theorems relative to a random set

We describe recent advances in the study of random analogues of combinatorial theorems.Comment: 26 pages. Submitted to Proceedings of the ICM 201

Lower Bounds on the van der Waerden Numbers: Randomized- and Deterministic-Constructive

The van der Waerden number W(k,2) is the smallest integer n such that every 2-coloring of 1 to n has a monochromatic arithmetic progression of length k. The existence of such an n for any k is due to van der Waerden but known upper bounds on W(k,2) are enormous. Much effort was put into developing lower bounds on W(k,2). Most of these lower bound proofs employ the probabilistic method often in combination with the Lov\'asz Local Lemma. While these proofs show the existence of a 2-coloring that has no monochromatic arithmetic progression of length k they provide no efficient algorithm to find such a coloring. These kind of proofs are often informally called nonconstructive in contrast to constructive proofs that provide an efficient algorithm. This paper clarifies these notions and gives definitions for deterministic- and randomized-constructive proofs as different types of constructive proofs. We then survey the literature on lower bounds on W(k,2) in this light. We show how known nonconstructive lower bound proofs based on the Lov\'asz Local Lemma can be made randomized-constructive using the recent algorithms of Moser and Tardos. We also use a derandomization of Chandrasekaran, Goyal and Haeupler to transform these proofs into deterministic-constructive proofs. We provide greatly simplified and fully self-contained proofs and descriptions for these algorithms