On Baire measurable colorings of group actions

The field of descriptive combinatorics investigates to what extent classical combinatorial results and techniques can be made topologically or measure-theoretically well behaved. This paper examines a class of coloring problems induced by actions of countable groups on Polish spaces, with the requirement that the desired coloring be Baire measurable. We show that the set of all such coloring problems that admit a Baire measurable solution for a particular free action $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}$ is complete analytic (apart from the trivial situation when the orbit equivalence relation induced by $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}$ is smooth on a comeager set); this result confirms the ‘hardness’ of finding a topologically well-behaved coloring. When $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}$ is the shift action, we characterize the class of problems for which $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}$ has a Baire measurable coloring in purely combinatorial terms; it turns out that closely related concepts have already been studied in graph theory with no relation to descriptive set theory. We remark that our framework permits a wholly dynamical interpretation (with colorings corresponding to equivariant maps to a given subshift), so this article can also be viewed as a contribution to generic dynamics.

A Functional Equation for the Cosine

It is known [3], [5] that, the complex-valued solutions of(B)(apart from the trivial solution f(x)≡0) are of the form(C)(D)In case f is a measurable solution of (B), then f is continuous [2], [3] and the corresponding ϕ in (C) is also continuous and ϕ is of the form [1],(E)In this paper, the functional equation(P)where f is a complex-valued, measurable function of the real variable and A≠0 is a real constant, is considered. It is shown that f is continuous and that (apart from the trivial solutions f ≡ 0, 1), the only functions which satisfy (P) are the cosine functions cos ax and - cos bx, where a and b belong to a denumerable set of real numbers.