We prove a removal lemma for systems of linear equations over finite fields: let $X_1,...,X_m$ be subsets of the finite field $\F_q$ and let $A$ be a $(k\times m)$ matrix with coefficients in $\F_q$ and rank $k$; if the linear system $Ax=b$ has $o(q^{m-k})$ solutions with $x_i\in X_i$, then we can destroy all these solutions by deleting $o(q)$ elements from each $X_i$. This extends a result of Green [Geometric and Functional Analysis 15(2) (2005), 340--376] for a single linear equation in abelian groups to systems of linear equations. In particular, we also obtain an analogous result for systems of equations over integers, a result conjectured by Green. Our proof uses the colored version of the hypergraph Removal Lemma.
Green [Geometric and Functional Analysis 15 (2005), 340--376] established a version of the Szemerédi Regularity Lemma for abelian groups and derived the Removal Lemma for abelian groups as its corollary. We provide another proof of his Removal Lemma that allows us to extend its statement to all finite groups. We also discuss possible extensions of the Removal Lemma to systems of equations.
In this paper we present an extension of the removal lemma to integer linear systems over abelian groups. We prove that, if the $k$--determinantal of an integer $(k\times m)$ matrix $A$ is coprime with the order $n$ of a group $G$ and the number of solutions of the system $Ax=b$ with $x_1\in X_1,..., x_m\in X_m$ is $o(n^{m-k})$, then we can eliminate $o(n)$ elements in each set to remove all these solutions. This is a follow-up of our former paper 'A Removal Lemma for Systems of Linear Equations over Finite Fields' arXiv:0809.1846v1, which dealt with the case of finite fields.
We present a general framework to represent discrete configuration systems using hypergraphs. This representation allows one to transfer combinatorial removal lemmas to their analogues for configuration systems. These removal lemmas claim that a system without many configurations can be made configuration-free by removing a few of its constituent elements. As applications of this approach we give, an alternative proof of the removal lemma for permutations by Cooper, a general version of a removal lemma for linear systems in finite abelian groups, an interpretation of the mentioned removal lemm…
We study the integral and measure theory of the ultraproduct of finite sets. As a main application we construct limit objects for hypergraph sequences. We give a new proof for the Hypergraph Removal Lemma and the Hypergraph Regularity Lemma.
For each $k\geq 3$, Green proved an arithmetic $k$-cycle removal lemma for any abelian group $G$. The best known bounds relating the parameters in the lemma for general $G$ are of tower-type. For $k>3$, even in the case $G=\mathbb{F}_2^n$ no better bounds were known prior to this paper. This special case has received considerable attention due to its close connection to property testing of boolean functions. For every $k\geq 3$, we prove a polynomial bound relating the parameters for $G=\mathbb{F}_p^n$, where $p$ is any fixed prime. This extends the result for $k=3$ by the first two authors. D…
We give an extension of a graph result by Alon and Shapira. And it affirmatively settles a question on property testing raised by them. All monotone hypergraph properties and all hereditary partite hypergraph properties are testable. Our proof is constructive and based on a new hypergraph regularity lemma.
We obtain a removal lemma for systems of linear equations over the circle group, using a similar result for finite fields due to Král, Serra and Vena, and we discuss some applications.
Recent work of Gowers and Nagle, Rödl, Schacht, and Skokan has established a hypergraph removal lemma, which in turn implies some results of Szemerédi and Furstenberg-Katznelson concerning one-dimensional and multi-dimensional arithmetic progressions respectively. In this paper we shall give a self-contained proof of this hypergraph removal lemma. In fact we prove a slight strengthening of the result, which we will use in a subsequent paper to establish infinitely many constellations of a prescribed shape in the Gaussian primes.
Let H be a fixed graph with h vertices. The graph removal lemma states that every graph on n vertices with o(n^h) copies of H can be made H-free by removing o(n^2) edges. We give a new proof which avoids Szemerédi's regularity lemma and gives a better bound. This approach also works to give improved bounds for the directed and multicolored analogues of the graph removal lemma. This answers questions of Alon and Gowers.
A common theme in many extremal problems in graph theory is the relation between local and global properties of graphs. One of the most celebrated results of this type is the Ruzsa-Szemerédi triangle removal lemma, which states that if a graph is $\varepsilon$-far from being triangle free, then most subsets of vertices of size $C(\varepsilon)$ are not triangle free. Unfortunately, the best known upper bound on $C(\varepsilon)$ is given by a tower-type function, and it is known that $C(\varepsilon)$ is not polynomial in $\varepsilon^{-1}$. The triangle removal lemma has been extended to many ot…
The graph removal lemma states that any graph on n vertices with o(n^{v(H)}) copies of a fixed graph H may be made H-free by removing o(n^2) edges. Despite its innocent appearance, this lemma and its extensions have several important consequences in number theory, discrete geometry, graph theory and computer science. In this survey we discuss these lemmas, focusing in particular on recent improvements to their quantitative aspects.
The clique removal lemma says that for every $r \geq 3$ and $\varepsilon>0$, there exists some $δ>0$ so that every $n$-vertex graph $G$ with fewer than $δn^r$ copies of $K_r$ can be made $K_r$-free by removing at most $\varepsilon n^2$ edges. The dependence of $δ$ on $\varepsilon$ in this result is notoriously difficult to determine: it is known that $δ^{-1}$ must be at least super-polynomial in $\varepsilon^{-1}$, and that it is at most of tower type in $\log \varepsilon^{-1}$. We prove that if one imposes an appropriate minimum degree condition on $G$, then one can actually take $δ$ to be a …
The graph removal lemma is a fundamental result in extremal graph theory which says that for every fixed graph $H$ and $\varepsilon > 0$, if an $n$-vertex graph $G$ contains $\varepsilon n^2$ edge-disjoint copies of $H$ then $G$ contains $δn^{v(H)}$ copies of $H$ for some $δ= δ(\varepsilon,H) > 0$. The current proofs of the removal lemma give only very weak bounds on $δ(\varepsilon,H)$, and it is also known that $δ(\varepsilon,H)$ is not polynomial in $\varepsilon$ unless $H$ is bipartite. Recently, Fox and Wigderson initiated the study of minimum degree conditions guaranteeing that $δ(\vareps…
We study quantitative relationships between the triangle removal lemma and several of its variants. One such variant, which we call the triangle-free lemma, states that for each $ε>0$ there exists $M$ such that every triangle-free graph $G$ has an $ε$-approximate homomorphism to a triangle-free graph $F$ on at most $M$ vertices (here an $ε$-approximate homomorphism is a map $V(G) \to V(F)$ where all but at most $ε|V(G)|^2$ edges of $G$ are mapped to edges of $F$). One consequence of our results is that the least possible $M$ in the triangle-free lemma grows faster than exponential in any polyn…
Let $G$ be an abelian group of bounded exponent and $A \subseteq G$. We show that if the collection of translates of $A$ has VC dimension at most $d$, then for every $ε>0$ there is a subgroup $H$ of $G$ of index at most $ε^{-d-o(1)}$ such that one can add or delete at most $ε|G|$ elements to/from $A$ to make it a union of $H$-cosets. We also establish a removal lemma with polynomial bounds, with applications to property testing, for induced bipartite patterns in a finite abelian group with bounded exponent.
Obtaining an efficient bound for the triangle removal lemma is one of the most outstanding open problems of extremal combinatorics. Perhaps the main bottleneck for achieving this goal is that triangle-free graphs can be highly unstructured. For example, triangle-free graphs might have only regular partitions (in the sense of Szemerédi) of tower-type size. And indeed, essentially all the graph properties ${\cal P}$ for which removal lemmas with reasonable bounds were obtained, are such that every graph satisfying ${\cal P}$ has a small regular partition. So in some sense, a barrier for obtainin…
We prove a removal lemma for induced ordered hypergraphs, simultaneously generalizing Alon--Ben-Eliezer--Fischer's removal lemma for ordered graphs and the induced hypergraph removal lemma. That is, we show that if an ordered hypergraph $(V,G,<)$ has few induced copies of a small ordered hypergraph $(W,H,\prec)$ then there is a small modification $G'$ so that $(V,G',<)$ has no induced copies of $(W,H,\prec)$. (Note that we do \emph{not} need to modify the ordering $<$.) We give our proof in the setting of an ultraproduct (that is, a Keisler graded probability space), where we can give an abstr…
We introduce a correspondence principle (analogous to the Furstenberg correspondence principle) that allows one to extract an infinite random graph or hypergraph from a sequence of increasingly large deterministic graphs or hypergraphs. As an application we present a new (infinitary) proof of the hypergraph removal lemma of Nagle-Schacht-Rödl-Skokan and Gowers, which does not require the hypergraph regularity lemma and requires significantly less computation. This in turn gives new proofs of several corollaries of the hypergraph removal lemma, such as Szemerédi's theorem on arithmetic progress…
In this note we observe that in the hyper-graph removal lemma the edge removal can be done in a way that the symmetries of the original hyper-graph remain preserved. As an application we prove the following generalization of Szemerédi's Theorem on arithmetic progressions. If in an Abelian group $A$ there are sets $S_1,S_2...,S_t$ such that the number of arithmetic progressions $x_1,x_2,...,x_t$ with $x_i\in S_i$ is $o(|A|^2)$ then we can shrink each $S_i$ by $o(|A|)$ elements such that the new sets don't have such a diagonal arithmetic progression.
The triangle removal lemma states that a simple graph with o(n^3) triangles can be made triangle-free by removing o(n^2) edges. It is natural to ask if this widely used result can be extended to multi-graphs (or equivalently, weighted graphs). In this short paper we rule out the possibility of such an extension by showing that there are multi-graphs with only n^{2+o(1)} triangles that are still far from being triangle-free. On the other hand, we show that for some g(n)=ω(1), if a multi-graph (or weighted graph) has only g(n)n^2 triangles then it must be close to being triangle-free. The proof …
A recent result of Alon, Ben-Eliezer and Fischer establishes an induced removal lemma for ordered graphs. That is, if $F$ is an ordered graph and $\varepsilon>0$, then there exists $δ_{F}(\varepsilon)>0$ such that every $n$-vertex ordered graph $G$ containing at most $δ_{F}(\varepsilon) n^{v(F)}$ induced copies of $F$ can be made induced $F$-free by adding/deleting at most $\varepsilon n^2$ edges. We prove that $δ_{F}(\varepsilon)$ can be chosen to be a polynomial function of $\varepsilon$ if and only if $|V(F)|=2$, or $F$ is the ordered graph with vertices $x<y<z$ and edges $\{x,y\},\{x,z\}$ …
Our work builds on known results for k-uniform hypergraphs including the existence of limits, a Regularity Lemma and a Removal Lemma. Our main tool here is a theory of measures on ultraproduct spaces which establishes a correspondence between ultraproduct spaces and Euclidean spaces. First we show the existence of a limit object for convergent sequences of relational structures and as a special case, we retrieve the known limits for graphs and digraphs. Then we extend this notion to finite models of a fixed universal theory. We also state and prove a Regularity Lemma and a Removal Lemma. We wi…
The classical sharp threshold theorem of Friedgut and Kalai (1996) asserts that any symmetric monotone function $f:\{0,1\}^{n}\to\{0,1\}$ exhibits a sharp threshold phenomenon. This means that the expectation of $f$ with respect to the biased measure $μ_{p}$ increases rapidly from 0 to 1 as $p$ increases. In this paper we present `robust' versions of the theorem, which assert that it holds also if the function is `almost' monotone, and admits a much weaker notion of symmetry. Unlike the original proof of the theorem which relies on hypercontractivity, our proof relies on a `regularity' lemma (…
We show, for any positive integer k, that there exists a graph in which any equitable partition of its vertices into k parts has at least ck^2/\log^* k pairs of parts which are not ε-regular, where c,ε>0 are absolute constants. This bound is tight up to the constant c and addresses a question of Gowers on the number of irregular pairs in Szemerédi's regularity lemma. In order to gain some control over irregular pairs, another regularity lemma, known as the strong regularity lemma, was developed by Alon, Fischer, Krivelevich, and Szegedy. For this lemma, we prove a lower bound of wowzer-type, w…
Suppose one needs to change the direction of at least $εn^2$ edges of an $n$-vertex tournament $T$, in order to make it $H$-free. A standard application of the regularity method shows that in this case $T$ contains at least $f^*_H(ε)n^h$ copies of $H$, where $f^*_H$ is some tower-type function. It has long been observed that many graph/digraph problems become easier when assuming that the host graph is a tournament. It is thus natural to ask if the removal lemma becomes easier if we assume that the digraph $G$ is a tournament. Our main result here is a precise characterization of the tournamen…
We give an arithmetic version of the recent proof of the triangle removal lemma by Fox [Fox11], for the group $\mathbb{F}_2^n$. A triangle in $\mathbb{F}_2^n$ is a triple $(x,y,z)$ such that $x+y+z = 0$. The triangle removal lemma for $\mathbb{F}_2^n$ states that for every $ε> 0$ there is a $δ> 0$, such that if a subset $A$ of $\mathbb{F}_2^n$ requires the removal of at least $ε\cdot 2^n$ elements to make it triangle-free, then it must contain at least $δ\cdot 2^{2n}$ triangles. This problem was first studied by Green [Gre05] who proved a lower bound on $δ$ using an arithmetic regularity lemma…
Let $p$ be a fixed prime. A triangle in $\mathbb{F}_p^n$ is an ordered triple $(x,y,z)$ of points satisfying $x+y+z=0$. Let $N=p^n=|\mathbb{F}_p^n|$. Green proved an arithmetic triangle removal lemma which says that for every $ε>0$ and prime $p$, there is a $δ>0$ such that if $X,Y,Z \subset \mathbb{F}_p^n$ and the number of triangles in $X \times Y \times Z$ is at most $δN^2$, then we can delete $εN$ elements from $X$, $Y$, and $Z$ and remove all triangles. Green posed the problem of improving the quantitative bounds on the arithmetic triangle removal lemma, and, in particular, asked whether a…
This is a companion note to the paper "Almost all Steiner triple systems have perfect matchings (arXiv:1611.02246). That paper contains several general lemmas about random Steiner triple systems; in this note we record analogues of these lemmas for random Latin squares, which in particular are necessary ingredients for our recent paper "Large deviations in random Latin squares" (arXiv:2106.11932). Most important is a relationship between uniformly random order-$n$ Latin squares and the triangle removal process on the complete tripartite graph $K_{n,n,n}$.
The authors and Fischer recently proved that any hereditary property of two-dimensional matrices (where the row and column order is not ignored) over a finite alphabet is testable with a constant number of queries, by establishing the following (ordered) matrix removal lemma: For any finite alphabet $Σ$, any hereditary property $\mathcal{P}$ of matrices over $Σ$, and any $ε> 0$, there exists $f_{\mathcal{P}}(ε)$ such that for any matrix $M$ over $Σ$ that is $ε$-far from satisfying $\mathcal{P}$, most of the $f_{\mathcal{P}}(ε) \times f_{\mathcal{P}}(ε)$ submatrices of $M$ do not satisfy $\math…
We complete the characterization of the digraphs $D$ for which the induced $D$-removal lemma has polynomial bounds, answering a question of Alon and Shapira. We also study the analogous problem for $k$-colored complete graphs. In particular, we prove a removal lemma with polynomial bounds for Gallai colorings.
A $k$-uniform family of subsets of $[n]$ is intersecting if it does not contain a disjoint pair of sets. The study of intersecting families is central to extremal set theory, dating back to the seminal Erdős-Ko-Rado theorem of 1961 that bounds the size of the largest such families. A recent trend has been to investigate the structure of set families with few disjoint pairs. Friedgut and Regev proved a general removal lemma, showing that when $γn \le k \le (\tfrac12 - γ)n$, a set family with few disjoint pairs can be made intersecting by removing few sets. We provide a simple proof of a removal…
In a finite abelian group $G$, define an additive matching to be a collection of triples $(x_i, y_i, z_i)$ such that $x_i + y_j + z_k = 0$ if and only if $i = j = k$. In the case that $G = \mathbb{F}_2^n$, Kleinberg, building on work of Croot-Lev-Pach and Ellenberg-Gijswijt, proved a polynomial upper bound on the size of an additive matching. Fox and Lovász used this to deduce polynomial bounds on Green's arithmetic removal lemma in $\mathbb{F}_2^n$. If $G$ is taken to be an arbitrary finite abelian group, the questions of bounding the size of an additive matching and giving bounds for Green's…
We offer a new proof of Furstenberg and Katznelson's density version of the Hales-Jewett Theorem: For any $δ> 0$ there is some $N_0 \geq 1$ such that whenever $A \subseteq [k]^N$ with $N \geq N_0$ and $|A|\geq δk^N$, $A$ contains a \textbf{combinatorial line}: that is, for some $I \subseteq [N]$ nonempty and $w_0 \in [k]^{[N]\setminus I}$ we have A \supseteq \{w: w|_{[N]\setminus I} = w_0, w|_I = \rm{const.}\}. Following Furstenberg and Katznelson, we first show that this result is equivalent to a `multiple recurrence' assertion for a class of probability measures enjoying a certain kind of st…
The investigation of conditions guaranteeing the appearance of cycles of certain lengths is one of the most well-studied topics in graph theory. In this paper we consider a problem of this type which asks, for fixed integers ${\ell}$ and $k$, how many copies of the $k$-cycle guarantee the appearance of an $\ell$-cycle? Extending previous results of Bollobás--Győri--Li and Alon--Shikhelman, we fully resolve this problem by giving tight (or nearly tight) bounds for all values of $\ell$ and $k$. We also present a somewhat surprising application of the above mentioned estimates to the study of the…
We show that the Gaussian primes $P[i] \subseteq \Z[i]$ contain infinitely constellations of any prescribed shape and orientation. More precisely, given any distinct Gaussian integers $v_0,...,v_{k-1}$, we show that there are infinitely many sets $\{a+rv_0,...,a+rv_{k-1}\}$, with $a \in \Z[i]$ and $r \in \Z \backslash \{0\}$, all of whose elements are Gaussian primes. The proof is modeled on a recent paper by Green and Tao and requires three ingredients. The first is a hypergraph removal lemma of Gowers and Rödl-Skokan; this hypergraph removal lemma can be thought of as a generalization of the…
We prove an arithmetic analog of the induced graph removal lemma for complexity 1 patterns over finite fields. Informally speaking, we show that given a fixed collection of $r$-colored complexity 1 arithmetic patterns over $\mathbb F_q$, every coloring $ϕ\colon \mathbb F_q^n \setminus\{0\} \to [r]$ with $o(1)$ density of every such pattern can be recolored on an $o(1)$-fraction of the space so that no such pattern remains.
We prove an arithmetic removal result for all compact abelian groups, generalizing a finitary removal result of Král', Serra and the third author. To this end, we consider infinite measurable hypergraphs that are invariant under certain group actions, and for these hypergraphs we prove a symmetry-preserving removal lemma, which extends a finitary result of the same name by the second author. We deduce our arithmetic removal result by applying this lemma to a specific type of invariant measurable hypergraph. As a direct application, we obtain the following generalization of Szemerédi's theorem:…
Using Goursat's lemma for groups, a simple representation and the invariant factor decompositions of the subgroups of the group Z_m x Z_n are deduced, where m and n are arbitrary positive integers. As consequences, explicit formulas for the total number of subgroups, the number of subgroups with a given invariant factor decomposition, and the number of subgroups of a given order are obtained.
Swierczkowski's Lemma - as it is usually formulated - asserts that if f is an at least quaternary operation on a finite set A and every operation obtained from f by identifying a pair of variables is a projection, then f is a semiprojection. We generalize this lemma in various ways. First, it is extended to B-valued functions on A instead of operations on A and to essentially at most unary functions instead of projections. Then we characterize the arity gap of functions of small arities in terms of quasi-arity, which in turn provides a further generalization of Swierczkowski's Lemma. Moreover,…
We study constructively the relations between the finite cases of Dickson's lemma. Although there are many constructive proofs of them, the novel aspect of our proofs is the extraction of a corresponding bound. We provide some new one-step unprovability results i.e., results of the form "a finite case of Dickson's lemma does not prove in one step a stronger case of it". Moreover, we study the infinite cases of Dickson's lemma from the point of view of constructive reverse mathematics. We work within Bishop's informal system of constructive mathematics BISH.
Let $P: \F \times \F \to \F$ be a polynomial of bounded degree over a finite field $\F$ of large characteristic. In this paper we establish the following dichotomy: either $P$ is a moderate asymmetric expander in the sense that $|P(A,B)| \gg |\F|$ whenever $A, B \subset \F$ are such that $|A| |B| \geq C |\F|^{2-1/8}$ for a sufficiently large $C$, or else $P$ takes the form $P(x,y) = Q(F(x)+G(y))$ or $P(x,y) = Q(F(x) G(y))$ for some polynomials $Q,F,G$. This is a reasonably satisfactory classification of polynomials of two variables that moderately expand (either symmetrically or asymmetrically…
Szemerédi's regularity lemma is a powerful tool in graph theory. It states that for every large enough graph, there exists a partition of the edge set with bounded size such that most induced subgraphs are quasirandom. When the graph is a definable set $ϕ(x, y)$ in a finite field $F_q$, Tao's algebraic graph regularity lemma shows that there is a partition of the graph $ϕ(x, y)$ such that all induced subgraphs are quasirandom and the error bound on quasirandomness is $O(q^{-1/4})$. In this work we prove an algebraic hypergraph regularity lemma for definable sets in finite fields, thus answerin…
This is an expository article detailing results concerning large arcs in finite projective spaces, which attempts to cover the most relevant results on arcs, simplifying and unifying proofs of known old and more recent theorems. The article is mostly self-contained and includes a proof of the most general form of Segre's lemma of tangents and a short proof of the MDS conjecture over prime fields based on this lemma.
In this paper we prove a combinatorial theorem for finite labellings of trees, and show that it is equivalent to a theorem for finite covers of metric trees and a fixed point theorem on metric trees. We trace how these connections mimic the equivalence of the Brouwer fixed point theorem with the classical KKM lemma and Sperner's lemma. We also draw connections to a KKM-type theorem about infinite covers of metric trees and fixed point theorems for non-compact metric trees. Finally, we develop a new KKM-type theorem for cycles, and discuss interesting social consequences, including an applicati…
We show that if G is a group and A is a finite subset of G with |A^2| < K|A|, then for all k there is a symmetric neighbourhood of the identity S with S^k a subset of A^2A^{-2} and |S| > exp(-K^{O(k)})|A|.
Let G be a finite graph with the non-k-order property (essentially, a uniform finite bound on the size of an induced sub-half-graph). A major result of the paper applies model-theoretic arguments to obtain a stronger version of Szemerédi's regularity lemma for such graphs, Theorem 5.18, in which there are no irregular pairs, the bounds are significantly improved, and each component satisfies an indivisibility condition. Motivation for this work comes from a coincidence of model-theoretic and graph-theoretic ideas. Namely, it was known that the "irregular pairs" in the statement of Szemerédi's …
