STRONG REDUCTIONS BETWEEN COMBINATORIAL PRINCIPLES

Abstract

AbstractThis paper is a contribution to the growing investigation of strong reducibilities between ${\rm{\Pi }}_2^1$ statements of second-order arithmetic, viewed as an extension of the traditional analysis of reverse mathematics. We answer several questions of Hirschfeldt and Jockusch [13] about Weihrauch (uniform) and strong computable reductions between various combinatorial principles related to Ramsey’s theorem for pairs. Among other results, we establish that the principle $SRT_2^2$ is not Weihrauch or strongly computably reducible to $D_{ < \infty }^2$, and that COH is not Weihrauch reducible to $SRT_{ < \infty }^2$, or strongly computably reducible to $SRT_2^2$. The last result also extends a prior result of Dzhafarov [9]. We introduce a number of new techniques for controlling the combinatorial and computability-theoretic properties of the problems and solutions we construct in our arguments.