Problem. Let there be six irrational numbers. Prove that there exists three irrational numbers among them such that the sum of any two of those irrational numbers is also irrational.
I have tried to prove it in the following way, but I am not sure whether it is watertight or not as I have just started learning graph theory.
Let there be a graph with $6$ vertices. We assign a weight equal to those six irrational numbers to each of the vertices. We join all the vertices with edges and color the edges in the following way:
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Edge is colored red if the sum of the weights of its end points is irrational.
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Edge is colored blue if the sum of the weights of its end points is rational.
We know that when we color a $6$-vertex graph with $2$ colors then there must be a monochromatic triangle.
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If the triangle is red then we are done.
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If it is blue, then let the irrational numbers be $a$, $b$ and $c$. Therefore $a+b$, $b+c$ and $c+a$ are all rational. Which implies $2(a+b+c)$ and $a+b+c$ is rational. As $a+b$ is rational and hence $c$ is also rational. But this is a contradiction.
Hence, our original statement is proved.
Best Answer
Your proof is OK.
But more easily we can prove more strong and general claim. Assume we have a collection of $n$ irrational numbers. We shall call numbers $a$ and $b$ equivalent if the difference $a-b$ is rational. So we can partition our collection into equivalence classes. We shall call classes $C$ and $C’$ complementary if $c+c’$ is rational for any $c\in C$ and $c’\in C’$. From our partition we can choose such classes which contain in total at least $n/2$ elements and no two complementary classes are chosen. It remains to remark that a sum of any two chosen elements is irrational. In particular, among $5$ irrational numbers we can choose $3$ with all mutual sums are irrational. From the other hand, a collection consisting of $n/2$ numbers $\sqrt{2}$ and $n/2$ numbers $2-\sqrt{2}$ witnesses that the bound $n/2$ is strict.