The main result of the paper is that assuming that the level $θ$ of distribution of primes exceeds 1/2, then there exists a positive $d\leq C(θ)$ such that there are arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions with the property that $p'=p+d$ is the next prime for each element of the progression. If $θ>0.971$, then the above holds for some $d\leq 16$.
We show that if besides the primes some other sequences (involving the Liouville function and the primes) have a common distribution level exceeding 0.7231 then for any positive even integer $h$ there are arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions of primes $p$ such that $p+h$ is also prime for each element of the progression. In case of $h=2$ this means that under some plausible unproved hypotheses about regular distribution of the primes and other sequences in arithmetic progressions we really have arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions in the sequence of twin primes.
We show that there exists a bounded pattern of m consecutive primes for any m>0, that means a tuple H_m of m distinct non-negative integers h_i (i=1,2,...m) such that its translations contain arbitrarily long (finite) arithmetic progressions. More precisely, the set of natural numbers n for which all components n+h_i (i=1,2,...m) are consecutive primes contains arbitrarily long (finite) arithmetic progressions. Moreover, the set of m-tuples that satisfy this property represents a positive proportion of all m-tuples. The present result is the generalization of the results of Green-Tao (about th…
We prove that there are arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions of primes. There are three major ingredients. The first is Szemeredi's theorem, which asserts that any subset of the integers of positive density contains progressions of arbitrary length. The second, which is the main new ingredient of this paper, is a certain transference principle. This allows us to deduce from Szemeredi's theorem that any subset of a sufficiently pseudorandom set of positive relative density contains progressions of arbitrary length. The third ingredient is a recent result of Goldston and Yildirim. Using this…
Green and Tao proved that the primes contains arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. We show that, essentially the same proof leads to the following result: The primes in an short interval contains many arithmetic progressions of any given length.
A strictly increasing sequence of positive integers is called a slightly curved sequence with small error if the sequence can be well-approximated by a function whose second derivative goes to zero faster than or equal to $1/x^α$ for some $α>0$. In this paper, we prove that arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions are contained in the graph of a slightly curved sequence with small error. Furthermore, we extend Szemerédi's theorem to a theorem about slightly curved sequences. As a corollary, it follows that the graph of the sequence $\{\lfloor{n^a}\rfloor\}_{n\in A}$ contains arbitrarily long a…
The Green-Tao Theorem, one of the most celebrated theorems in modern number theory, states that there exist arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions of prime numbers. In a related but different direction, a recent theorem of Shiu proves that there exist arbitrarily long strings of consecutive primes that lie in any arithmetic progression that contains infinitely many primes. Using the techniques of Shiu and Maier, this paper generalizes Shiu's Theorem to certain subsets of the primes such as primes of the form $\lfloor πn\rfloor$ and some of arithmetic density zero such as primes of the form $…
We investigate progressions in the set of pairs of integers $\mathbb{Z}^2$ and define a generalisation of the Jacobsthal function. For this function, we conjecture a specific upper bound and prove that this bound would be a sufficient condition for the truth of the Goldbach conjecture, the infinitude of prime twins, and more general of prime pairs with a fixed even difference.
Fix coprime natural numbers $a,q$. Assuming the Prime $k$-tuple Conjecture, we show that there exist arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions of Carmichael numbers, each of which lies in the reduced residue class $a$ mod $q$ and is a product of three distinct prime numbers.
A celebrated theorem of Delange gives a sufficient condition for an arithmetic function to be the sum of the associated Ramanujan expansion with the coefficients provided by a previous result of Wintner. By applying the Delange theorem to the correlation of the von Mangoldt function with its incomplete form, we deduce an inequality involving the counting function of the prime numbers in arithmetic progressions. A remarkable aspect is that such an inequality is equivalent to the famous conjectural formula by Hardy and Littlewood for the twin primes.
Let $G$ be a multiplicative subgroup of the prime field $\mathbb F_p$ of size $|G|> p^{1-κ}$ and $r$ an arbitrarily fixed positive integer. Assuming $κ=κ(r)>0$ and $p$ large enough, it is shown that any proportional subset $A\subset G$ contains non-trivial arithmetic progressions of length $r$. The main ingredient is the Szemerédi-Green-Tao theorem.
Let $k$ and $n$ be fixed positive integers. For each prime power $q\geqslant k\geqslant 3$, we show that any subset $A\subseteq \mathbb{Z}_q^n$ free of $k$-term arithmetic progressions has size $|A|\leqslant c_k(q)^n$ with a constant $c_k(q)$ that can be expressed explicitly in terms of $k$ and $q$. As a consequence, we can take $c_k(q)=0.8415q$ for sufficiently large $q$ and arbitrarily fixed $k\geq 3$.
In the present work we prove a number of surprising results about gaps between consecutive primes and arithmetic progressions in the sequence of generalized twin primes which could not have been proven without the recent fantastic achievement of Yitang Zhang about the existence of bounded gaps between consecutive primes. Most of these results would have belonged to the category of science fiction a decade ago. However, the presented results are far from being immediate consequences of Zhang's famous theorem: they require various new ideas, other important properties of the applied sieve functi…
A celebrated and deep result of Green and Tao states that the primes contain arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. In this note I provide a straightforward argument demonstrating that the primes get arbitrarily close to arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. The argument also applies to `large sets' in the sense of Erdős-Turán. The proof is short, completely self-contained, and aims to give a heuristic explanation of why the primes, and other large sets, possess arithmetic structure.
We establish the existence of infinitely many \emph{polynomial} progressions in the primes; more precisely, given any integer-valued polynomials $P_1, >..., P_k \in \Z[\m]$ in one unknown $\m$ with $P_1(0) = ... = P_k(0) = 0$ and any $\eps > 0$, we show that there are infinitely many integers $x,m$ with $1 \leq m \leq x^\eps$ such that $x+P_1(m), ..., x+P_k(m)$ are simultaneously prime. The arguments are based on those in Green and Tao, which treated the linear case $P_i = (i-1)\m$ and $\eps=1$; the main new features are a localization of the shift parameters (and the attendant Gowers norm obj…
Using geometric methods, we improve on the function field version of the Burgess bound, and show that, when restricted to certain special subspaces, the Möbius function over $\mathbb F_q[T]$ can be mimicked by Dirichlet characters. Combining these, we obtain a level of distribution close to $1$ for the Möbius function in arithmetic progressions, and resolve Chowla's $k$-point correlation conjecture with large uniformity in the shifts. Using a function field variant of a result by Fouvry-Michel on exponential sums involving the Möbius function, we obtain a level of distribution beyond $1/2$ for…
A famous theorem of Szemerédi asserts that all subsets of the integers with positive upper density will contain arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. There are many different proofs of this deep theorem, but they are all based on a fundamental dichotomy between structure and randomness, which in turn leads (roughly speaking) to a decomposition of any object into a structured (low-complexity) component and a random (discorrelated) component. Important examples of these types of decompositions include the Furstenberg structure theorem and the Szemerédi regularity lemma. One recent applicatio…
This is an article for a general mathematical audience on the author's work, joint with Terence Tao, establishing that there are arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions of primes. It is based on several one hour lectures, chiefly given at British universities.
The transference principle of Green and Tao enabled various authors to transfer Szemerédi's theorem on long arithmetic progressions in dense sets to various sparse sets of integers, mostly sparse sets of primes. In this paper, we provide a transference principle which applies to general affine-linear configurations of finite complexity. We illustrate the broad applicability of our transference principle with the case of almost twin primes, by which we mean either Chen primes or "bounded gap primes", as well as with the case of primes of the form $x^2+y^2+1$. Thus, we show that in these sets of…
A sequence $S=s_{1}s_{2}..._{n}$ is \emph{nonrepetitive} if no two adjacent blocks of $S$ are identical. In 1906 Thue proved that there exist arbitrarily long nonrepetitive sequences over 3-element set of symbols. We study a generalization of nonrepetitive sequences involving arithmetic progressions. We prove that for every $k\geqslant 1$ and every $c\geqslant 1$ there exist arbitrarily long sequences over at most $(1+\frac{1}{c})k+18k^{c/c+1}$ symbols whose subsequences indexed by arithmetic progressions with common differences from the set $\{1,2,...,k\}$ are nonrepetitive. This improves a p…
We find arbitrarily large configurations of irreducible polynomials over finite fields that are separated by low degree polynomials. Our proof adapts an argument of Pintz from the integers, in which he combines the methods of Goldston-Pintz-Yıldırım and Green-Tao to find arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions of generalized twin primes.
Schinzel's Hypothesis H is a general conjecture in number theory on prime values of polynomials that generalizes, e.g., the twin prime conjecture and Dirichlet's theorem on primes in arithmetic progression. We prove an arithmetic analog of this conjecture for polynomial rings over pseudo algebraically closed fields. This implies results over large finite fields. A main tool in the proof is an irreducibility theorems à la Hilbert.
Green and Tao famously proved in 2005 that any subset of the primes of fixed positive density contains arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. Green had previously shown that in fact any subset of the primes of relative density tending to zero sufficiently slowly contains a 3-term term progression. This was followed by work of Helfgott and de Roton, and Naslund, who improved the bounds on the relative density in the case of 3-term progressions. The aim of this note is to present an analogous result for longer progressions by combining a quantified version of the relative Szemerédi theorem gi…
A number $n$ is said to be economical if the prime power factorisation of $n$ can be written with no more digits than $n$ itself. We show that under a plausible hypothesis, related to the twin prime conjecture, there are arbitrarily long sequences of consecutive economial numbers, and exhibit such a sequence of length 9.
We investigate the relationships between several classical notions in arithmetic combinatorics and geometry including: the presence (or lack of) arithmetic progressions (or patches in dimensions $\geq 2$); the structure of tangent sets; and the Assouad dimension. We begin by extending a recent result of Dyatlov and Zahl by showing that a set cannot contain arbitrarily large arithmetic progressions (patches) if it has Assouad dimension strictly smaller than the ambient spatial dimension. Seeking a partial converse, we go on to prove that having Assouad dimension equal to the ambient spatial dim…
For each $s\in \mathbb R$ and $n\in \mathbb N$, let $σ_s(n) = \sum_{d\mid n}d^s$. In this article, we give a comparison between $σ_s(an+b)$ and $σ_s(cn+d)$ where $a$, $b$, $c$, $d$, $s$ are fixed, the vectors $(a,b)$ and $(c,d)$ are linearly independent over $\mathbb Q$, and $n$ runs over all positive integers. For example, if $|s|\leq 1$, $a, b, c, d\in \mathbb N$ are fixed and satisfy certain natural conditions, then $$ σ_s(an+b) < σ_s(cn+d)\quad\text{ for all $n\leq M$} $$ where $M$ may be arbitrarily large, but in fact $σ_s(an+b) - σ_s(cn+d)$ has infinitely many sign changes. The results a…
The celebrated Green-Tao theorem states that there are arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions in the primes. One of the main ingredients in their proof is a relative Szemerédi theorem which says that any subset of a pseudorandom set of integers of positive relative density contains long arithmetic progressions. In this paper, we give a simple proof of a strengthening of the relative Szemerédi theorem, showing that a much weaker pseudorandomness condition is sufficient. Our strengthened version can be applied to give the first relative Szemerédi theorem for $k$-term arithmetic progressions in…
Wall's theorem on arithmetic progressions says that if $0.a_1a_2a_3\dots$ is normal, then for any $k,\ell\in \mathbb{N}$, $0.a_ka_{k+\ell}a_{k+2\ell}\dots$ is also normal. We examine a converse statement and show that if $0.a_{n_1}a_{n_2}a_{n_3}\dots$ is normal for periodic increasing sequences $n_1<n_2<n_3<\dots$ of asymptotic density arbitrarily close to $1$, then $0.a_1a_2a_3\dots$ is normal. We show this is close to sharp in the sense that there are numbers $0.a_1a_2a_3\dots$ that are not normal, but for which $0.a_{n_1}a_{n_2}a_{n_3}\dots$ is normal along a large collection of sequences w…
We consider some problems of analytic number theory for elliptic curves which can be considered as analogues of classical questions around the distribution of primes in arithmetic progressions to large moduli, and of the question of twin primes. This leads to some local results on the distribution of the group structures of elliptic curves defined over a prime finite field, exhibiting an interesting dichotomy for the occurence of the possible groups. (Note : This paper was initially written in 2000/01, but after a four year wait for a referee report, it is now withdrawn and deposited in the ar…
The celebrated Green-Tao theorem states that the prime numbers contain arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. We give an exposition of the proof, incorporating several simplifications that have been discovered since the original paper.
In this expository article, we describe the recent approach, motivated by ergodic theory, towards detecting arithmetic patterns in the primes, and in particular establishing that the primes contain arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. One of the driving philosophies is to identify precisely what the obstructions could be that prevent the primes (or any other set) from behaving ``randomly'', and then either show that the obstructions do not actually occur, or else convert the obstructions into usable structural information on the primes.
We introduce a method for showing that there exist prime numbers which are very close together. The method depends on the level of distribution of primes in arithmetic progressions. Assuming the Elliott-Halberstam conjecture, we prove that there are infinitely often primes differing by 16 or less. Even a much weaker conjecture implies that there are infinitely often primes a bounded distance apart. Unconditionally, we prove that there exist consecutive primes which are closer than any arbitrarily small multiple of the average spacing, that is, \[ \liminf_{n\to \infty} \frac{p_{n+1}-p_n}{\log p…
Given any number field, we prove that there exist arbitrarily shaped constellations consisting of pairwise non-associate prime elements of the ring of integers. This result extends the celebrated Green-Tao theorem on arithmetic progressions of rational primes and Tao's theorem on constellations of Gaussian primes. Furthermore, we prove a constellation theorem on prime representations of binary quadratic forms with integer coefficients. More precisely, for a non-degenerate primitive binary quadratic form $F$ which is not negative definite, there exist arbitrarily shaped constellations consistin…
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…
By using the work of Frantzikinakis and Wierdl, we can see that for all $d\in\mathbb{N}$, $α\in(d,d+1)$, and integers $k\ge d+2$ and $r\ge1$, there exist infinitely many $n\in\mathbb{N}$ such that the sequence $(\lfloor{(n+rj)^α}\rfloor)_{j=0}^{k-1}$ is represented as $\lfloor{(n+rj)^α}\rfloor=p(j)$, $j=0,1,\ldots,k-1$, by using some polynomial $p(x)\in\mathbb{Q}[x]$ of degree at most $d$. In particular, the above sequence is an arithmetic progression when $d=1$. In this paper, we show the asymptotic density of such numbers $n$ as above. When $d=1$, the asymptotic density is equal to $1/(k-1)$…
The Selberg sieve provides majorants for certain arithmetic sequences, such as the primes and the twin primes. We prove an L^2-L^p restriction theorem for majorants of this type. An immediate application is to the estimation of exponential sums over prime k-tuples. Let a_1,...,a_k and b_1,...,b_k be positive integers. For t on the unit circle write h(t) := \sum_{n \in X} e(nt)$, where X is the set of all n <= N such that the numbers a_1n + b_1,..., a_kn + b_k are all prime. We obtain upper bounds for the L^p norm of h, p > 2, which are (conditionally on the prime tuple conjecture) of the corre…