Discrete structures and van der Waerden sets (Q791936)

This paper continues the study of discrete structures on manifolds commenced in the author's paper in ibid. 6, 204-219 (1983; see the preceding review). Given a dense sequence \(a=(a_ n)\) in a manifold M, a point \(x\in M\) is a van der Waerden point of \(a\) provided each neighbourhood of x contains a finite subsequence of \(a\) of the form \((a_ s,a_{s+k},...,a_{s+\ell k})\) of arbitrary length. Denote the set of such points by \(W(a)\). This paper studies \(W(a)\) and, among other results, shows that \(W(a)\) is non-empty and closed and that any non-empty and closed subset of M is of the form \(W(a)\). A connection is obtaind between \(W(a)\) and the discrete structure obtained from \(a\) as well as a version of the van der Waerden set in the tangent space bundle.