The basic theme of this paper is the fact that if $A$ is a finite set of integers, then the sum and product sets cannot both be small. A precise formulation of this fact is Conjecture 1 below due to Erd\H os-Szemerédi [E-S]. (see also [El], [T], and [K-T] for related aspects.) Only much weaker results or very special cases of this conjecture are presently known. One approach consists of assuming the sum set $A + A$ small and then deriving that the product set $AA$ is large (using Freiman's structure theorem). (cf [N-T], [Na3].) We follow the reverse route and prove that if $|AA| < c|A|$, then $|A+A| > c^\prime |A|^2$ (see Theorem 1). A quantitative version of this phenomenon combined with Plünnecke type of inequality (due to Ruzsa) permit us to settle completely a related conjecture in [E-S] on the growth in $k$. If $$ g(k) \equiv \text{min}\{|A[1]| + |A\{1\}|\} $$ over all sets $A\subset \Bbb Z$ of cardinality $|A| = k$ and where $A[1]$ (respectively, $A\{1\}$) refers to the simple sum (resp., product) of elements of $A$. (See (0.6), (0.7).) It was conjectured in [E-S] that $g(k)$ grows faster than any power of $k$ for $k\to\infty$. We will prove here that $\ell n g(k)\sim\frac{(\ell n k)^2}{\ell n \ell n k}$ (see Theorem 2) which is the main result of this paper.
In their seminal paper Erdős and Szemerédi formulated conjectures on the size of sumset and product set of integers. The strongest form of their conjecture is about sums and products along the edges of a graph. In this paper we show that this strong form of the Erdős-Szemerédi conjecture does not hold. We give upper and lower bounds on the cardinalities of sumsets, product sets and ratio sets along the edges of graphs.
Let $q$ be a power of a prime and $\mathbb{F}_q$ the finite field consisting of $q$ elements. We prove explicit upper bounds on the number of incidences between lines and Cartesian products in $\mathbb{F}_q^2$. We also use our results on point-line incidences to give new sum-product type estimates concerning sums of reciprocals.
We show that a dense subset of a sufficiently large group multiplication table contains either a large part of the addition table of the integers modulo some $k$, or the entire multiplication table of a certain large abelian group, as a subgrid. As a consequence, we show that triples systems coming from a finite group contain configurations with $t$ triples spanning $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{t})$ vertices, which is the best possible up to the implied constant. We confirm that for all $t$ we can find a collection of $t$ triples spanning at most $t+3$ vertices, resolving the Brown--Erd\H os--Sós conjec…
In this paper we completely resolve the well-known problem of Erdős and Sauer from 1975 which asks for the maximum number of edges an $n$-vertex graph can have without containing a $k$-regular subgraph, for some fixed integer $k\geq 3$. We prove that any $n$-vertex graph with average degree at least $C_k\log \log n$ contains a $k$-regular subgraph. This matches the lower bound of Pyber, Rödl and Szemerédi and substantially improves an old result of Pyber, who showed that average degree at least $C_k\log n$ is enough. Our method can also be used to settle asymptotically a problem raised by Erdő…
The first application of Szemerédi's powerful regularity method was the following celebrated Ramsey-Turán result proved by Szemerédi in 1972: any K_4-free graph on N vertices with independence number o(N) has at most (1/8 + o(1)) N^2 edges. Four years later, Bollobás and Erdős gave a surprising geometric construction, utilizing the isoperimetric inequality for the high dimensional sphere, of a K_4-free graph on N vertices with independence number o(N) and (1/8 - o(1)) N^2 edges. Starting with Bollobás and Erdős in 1976, several problems have been asked on estimating the minimum possible indepe…
Let $r_k(n)$ denote the maximum cardinality of a set $A \subset \{1,2, \dots, n \}$ such that $A$ does not contain a $k$-term arithmetic progression. In this paper, we give a method of constructing such a set and prove the lower bound $n^{1-\frac{c_k}{k \ln k}} < r_k(n)$ where $k$ is prime, and $c_k \rightarrow 1$ as $k \rightarrow \infty$. This bound is the best known for an increasingly large interval of $n$ as we choose larger and larger $k$. We also demonstrate that one can prove or disprove a conjecture of Erdős on arithmetic progressions in large sets once tight enough bounds on $r_k(n)$…
An old conjecture of Graham stated that if $n$ is a prime and $S$ is a sequence of $n$ terms from the cyclic group $C_n$ such that all (nontrivial) zero-sum subsequences have the same length, then $S$ must contain at most two distinct terms. In 1976, Erdős and Szemeredi gave a proof of the conjecture for sufficiently large primes $n$. However, the proof was complicated enough that the details for small primes were never worked out. Both in the paper of Erdős and Szemeredi and in a later survey by Erdős and Graham, the complexity of the proof was lamented. Recently, a new proof, valid even for …
We prove a Szemerédi-Trotter type theorem and a sum-product estimate in the setting of finite quasifields. These estimates generalize results of the fourth author, of Garaev, and of Vu. We generalize results of Gyarmati and Sárközy on the solvability of the equations $a + b = cd$ and $ab + 1 = cd$ over a finite field. Other analogous results that are known to hold in finite fields are generalized to finite quasifields.
Let $A$ be a subset of a finite field $F := \Z/q\Z$ for some prime $q$. If $|F|^δ< |A| < |F|^{1-δ}$ for some $δ> 0$, then we prove the estimate $|A+A| + |A.A| \geq c(δ) |A|^{1+\eps}$ for some $\eps = \eps(δ) > 0$. This is a finite field analogue of a result of Erdos and Szemeredi. We then use this estimate to prove a Szemeredi-Trotter type theorem in finite fields, and obtain a new estimate for the Erdos distance problem in finite fields, as well as the three-dimensional Kakeya problem in finite fields.
The Erdős--Ginzburg--Ziv Problem is a classical extremal problem in discrete geometry. Given $m$ and $n$, the problem asks about the smallest number $s$ such that among any $s$ points in the integer lattice $\mathbb{Z}^n$ one can find $m$ points whose centroid is again a lattice point. Despite of a lot of attention over the last 50 years, this problem is far from well-understood. For fixed dimension $n$, Alon and Dubiner proved that the answer grows linearly with $m$. In this paper, we focus on the opposite case, where the number $m$ is fixed and the dimension $n$ is large. We drastically impr…
The conjecture of Brown, Erdős and Sós from 1973 states that, for any $k \ge 3$, if a $3$-uniform hypergraph $H$ with $n$ vertices does not contain a set of $k+3$ vertices spanning at least $k$ edges then it has $o(n^2)$ edges. The case $k=3$ of this conjecture is the celebrated $(6,3)$-theorem of Ruzsa and Szemerédi which implies Roth's theorem on $3$-term arithmetic progressions in dense sets of integers. Solymosi observed that, in order to prove the conjecture, one can assume that $H$ consists of triples $(a, b, ab)$ of some finite quasigroup $Γ$. Since this problem remains open for all $k …
Complete tripartite subgraphs of balanced tripartite graphs with large minimum degree
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学）；Xiangtan University（湘潭大学）；Georgia State University（佐治亚州立大学）
A perfect $K_r$-tiling in a graph $G$ is a collection of vertex-disjoint copies of the clique $K_r$ in $G$ covering every vertex of $G$. The famous Hajnal--Szemerédi theorem determines the minimum degree threshold for forcing a perfect $K_r$-tiling in a graph $G$. The notion of discrepancy appears in many branches of mathematics. In the graph setting, one assigns the edges of a graph $G$ labels from $\{-1,1\}$, and one seeks substructures $F$ of $G$ that have `high' discrepancy (i.e. the sum of the labels of the edges in $F$ is far from $0$). In this paper we determine the minimum degree thres…
In 1975 Szemerédi proved the long-standing conjecture of Erdős and Turán that any subset of $\bbZ$ having positive upper Banach density contains arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. Szemerédi's proof was entirely combinatorial, but two years later Furstenberg gave a quite different proof of Szemerédi's Theorem by first showing its equivalence to an ergodic-theoretic assertion of multiple recurrence, and then bringing new machinery in ergodic theory to bear on proving that. His ergodic-theoretic approach subsequently yielded several other results in extremal combinatorics, as well as revea…
The sum-product conjecture of Erd\H os and Szemerédi states that, given a finite set $A$ of positive numbers, one can find asymptotic lower bounds for $\max\{|A+A|,|A\cdot A|\}$ of the order of $|A|^{1+δ}$ for every $δ<1$. In this paper we consider the set of all spectral radii of $n\times n$ matrices with entries in $A$, and find lower bounds for the cardinality of this set. In the case $n=2$, this cardinality is necessarily larger than $\max\{|A+A|,|A\cdot A|\}$.
Bollobás, Erdős, and Szemerédi [Discrete Math 13 (1975), 97--107] investigated a tripartite generalization of the Zarankiewicz problem: what minimum degree forces a tripartite graph with $n$ vertices in each part to contain an octahedral graph $K_3(2)$? They proved that $n+2^{-1/2}n^{3/4}$ suffices and suggested it could be weakened to $n+cn^{1/2}$ for some constant $c>0$. In this note we show that their method only gives $n+ (1+o(1)) n^{11/12}$ and provide many constructions that show if true, $n+ c n^{1/2}$ is better possible.
We study a lower bound for the constant of the Szemerédi-Trotter theorem. In particular, we show that a recent infinite family of point-line configurations satisfies $I({\mathcal P},{\mathcal L})\ge (c+o(1)) |{\mathcal P}|^{2/3}|{\mathcal L}|^{2/3}$, with $c\approx 1.27$. Our technique is based on studying a variety of properties of Euler's totient function. We also improve the current best constant for Elekes's construction from 1 to about 1.27. From an expository perspective, this is the first full analysis of the constant of Erd\H os's construction.
Primitive sets and von Mangoldt chains: Erdős Problem #1196 and beyond
OpenAI；Queens’ College, University of Cambridge（剑桥大学女王学院）；School of Mathematics, Southeast University（东南大学数学学院）；School of Mathematics and Statistics, Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学数学与统计学院）
Szemerédi's regularity lemma is a fundamental tool in extremal combinatorics. However, the original version is only helpful in studying dense graphs. In the 1990s, Kohayakawa and Rödl proved an analogue of Szemerédi's regularity lemma for sparse graphs as part of a general program toward extending extremal results to sparse graphs. Many of the key applications of Szemerédi's regularity lemma use an associated counting lemma. In order to prove extensions of these results which also apply to sparse graphs, it remained a well-known open problem to prove a counting lemma in sparse graphs. The main…
The set-colouring Ramsey number $R_{r,s}(k)$ is defined to be the minimum $n$ such that if each edge of the complete graph $K_n$ is assigned a set of $s$ colours from $\{1,\ldots,r\}$, then one of the colours contains a monochromatic clique of size $k$. The case $s = 1$ is the usual $r$-colour Ramsey number, and the case $s = r - 1$ was studied by Erdős, Hajnal and Rado in 1965, and by Erdős and Szemerédi in 1972. The first significant results for general $s$ were obtained only recently, by Conlon, Fox, He, Mubayi, Suk and Verstraëte, who showed that $R_{r,s}(k) = 2^{Θ(kr)}$ if $s/r$ is bounde…
For an abelian group $G$ and an integer $t > 0$, the \emph{modified Erdös--Ginzburg--Ziv constant} $s_t'(G)$ is the smallest integer $\ell$ such that any zero-sum sequence of length at least $\ell$ with elements in $G$ contains a zero-sum subsequence (not necessarily consecutive) of length $t$. We compute $s_t'(G)$ for $G = \mathbb Z/n\mathbb Z$ and for $t = n$, $G = (\mathbb Z/n\mathbb Z)^2$.
We construct large subsets of the first $N$ positive integers which avoid certain arithmetic configurations. In particular, we construct a set of order $N^{0.7685}$ lacking the configuration $\{x,x+y,x+y^2\},$ surpassing the $N^{3/4}$ limit of Ruzsa's construction for sets lacking a square difference. We also extend Ruzsa's construction to sets lacking polynomial differences for a wide class of univariate polynomials. Finally, we turn to multivariate differences, constructing a set of order $N^{1/2}$ lacking a difference equal to a sum of two squares. This is in contrast to the analogous probl…
Let $n$ be a positive integer and let $S$ be a sequence of $n$ integers in the interval $[0,n-1]$. If there is an $r$ such that any nonempty subsequence with sum $\equiv 0$ $\pmod n$ has length $=r,$ then $S$ has at most two distinct values. This proves a conjecture of R. L. Graham. A previous result of P. Erdős and E. Szemerédi shows the validity of this conjecture if $n$ is a large prime number.
In this article a family of recursive and self-similar matrices is constructed. It is shown that the Plücker matrix of the Isotropic Grassmannian variety is a direct sum of this class of matrices.
In their seminal paper from 1983, Erdős and Szemerédi showed that any $n$ distinct integers induce either $n^{1+ε}$ distinct sums of pairs or that many distinct products, and conjectured a lower bound of $n^{2-o(1)}$. They further proposed a generalization of this problem, in which the sums and products are taken along the edges of a given graph $G$ on $n$ labeled vertices. They conjectured a version of the sum-product theorem for general graphs that have at least $n^{1+ε}$ edges. In this work, we consider sum-product theorems for sparse graphs, and show that this problem has important consequ…
We generalise the Elekes-Szabó theorem to arbitrary arity and dimension and characterise the complex algebraic varieties without power saving. The characterisation involves certain algebraic subgroups of commutative algebraic groups endowed with an extra structure arising from a skew field of endomorphisms. We also extend the Erdős-Szemerédi sum-product phenomenon to elliptic curves. Our approach is based on Hrushovski's framework of pseudo-finite dimensions and the abelian group configuration theorem.
The Erdős-Gallai Theorem states that every graph of average degree more than $l-2$ contains a path of order $l$ for $l\ge 2$. In this paper, we obtain a stability version of the Erdős-Gallai Theorem in terms of minimum degree. Let $G$ be a connected graph of order $n$ and $F=(\bigcup_{i=1}^kP_{2a_i})\bigcup(\bigcup_{i=1}^lP_{2b_i+1})$ be $k+l$ disjoint paths of order $2a_1, \ldots, 2a_{k}, 2b_1+1, \ldots, 2b_l+1,$ respectively, where $k\ge 0$, $0\le l\le 2$, and $k+l\geq 2$. If the minimum degree $δ(G)\ge \sum_{i=1}^ka_i+\sum_{i=1}^lb_i-1$, then $F\subseteq G$ except several classes of graphs …
We show that if A is a finite set of integers then it has a subset S of size \log^{1+c} |A| (c>0 absolute) such that s+s' is never in A when s and s' are distinct elements of S.
We prove the following theorem: for all positive integers $b$ there exists a positive integer $k$, such that for every finite set $A$ of integers with cardinality $|A| > 1$, we have either $$ |A + ... + A| \geq |A|^b$$ or $$ |A \cdot ... \cdot A| \geq |A|^b$$ where $A + ... + A$ and $A \cdot ... \cdot A$ are the collections of $k$-fold sums and products of elements of $A$ respectively. This is progress towards a conjecture of Erdös and Szemerédi on sum and product sets.
Let $\{a_1, . . . , a_n\}$ be a set of positive integers with $a_1 < \dots < a_n$ such that all $2^n$ subset sums are distinct. A famous conjecture by Erdős states that $a_n>c\cdot 2^n$ for some constant $c$, while the best result known to date is of the form $a_n>c\cdot 2^n/\sqrt{n}$. In this paper, we weaken the condition by requiring that only sums corresponding to subsets of size smaller than or equal to $λn$ be distinct. For this case, we derive lower and upper bounds on the smallest possible value of $a_n$.
We present two short proofs giving the best known asymptotic lower bound for the maximum element in a set of $n$ positive integers with distinct subset sums.
In 1970, Erdős and Sárközy wrote a joint paper studying sequences of integers $a_1<a_2<\dots$ having what they called property P, meaning that no $a_i$ divides the sum of two larger $a_j,a_k$. In the paper, it was stated that the authors believed, but could not prove, that a subset $A\subset[n]$ with property P has cardinality at most $|A|\leqslant \left\lfloor \frac{n}{3}\right\rfloor+1$. In 1997, Erdős offered \$100 for a proof or disproof of the claim that $|A|\leqslant \frac{n}{3}+C$, for some absolute constant $C$. We resolve this problem, and in fact prove that $|A|\leqslant\left\lfloor …
A set A of integers is said to be sum-free if there are no solutions to the equation x + y = z with x,y and z all in A. Answering a question of Cameron and Erdos, we show that the number of sum-free subsets of {1,...,N} is O(2^(N/2)).
In this paper we show that every set $A \subset \mathbb{N}$ with positive density contains $B+C$ for some pair $B,C$ of infinite subsets of $\mathbb{N}$, settling a conjecture of Erdős. The proof features two different decompositions of an arbitrary bounded sequence into a structured component and a pseudo-random component. Our methods are quite general, allowing us to prove a version of this conjecture for countable amenable groups.
In 1981, Erdős and Hajnal asked whether the sum of the reciprocals of the odd cycle lengths in a graph with infinite chromatic number is necessarily infinite. Let $\mathcal{C}(G)$ be the set of cycle lengths in a graph $G$ and let $\mathcal{C}_\text{odd}(G)$ be the set of odd numbers in $\mathcal{C}(G)$. We prove that, if $G$ has chromatic number $k$, then $\sum_{\ell\in \mathcal{C}_\text{odd}(G)}1/\ell\geq (1/2-o_k(1))\log k$. This solves Erdős and Hajnal's odd cycle problem, and, furthermore, this bound is asymptotically optimal. In 1984, Erdős asked whether there is some $d$ such that each …
Let $\mathcal S$ be a multiset of integers. We say $\mathcal S$ is a $\textit{zero-sum sequence}$ if the sum of its elements is 0. We study zero-sum sequences whose elements lie in the interval $[-k,k]$ such that no subsequence of length $t$ is also zero-sum. Given these restrictions, Augspurger, Minter, Shoukry, Sissokho, Voss show that there are arbitrarily long $t$-avoiding, $k$-bounded zero-sum sequences unless $t$ is divisible by $\mathrm{LCM}(2,3,4,\dots,2k-1)$. We confirm a conjecture of these authors that for $k$ and $t$ such that this divisibility condition holds, every zero-sum seque…
We prove a point-wise and average bound for the number of incidences between points and hyper-planes in vector spaces over finite fields. While our estimates are, in general, sharp, we observe an improvement for product sets and sets contained in a sphere. We use these incidence bounds to obtain significant improvements on the arithmetic problem of covering ${\mathbb F}_q$, the finite field with q elements, by $A \cdot A+... +A \cdot A$, where A is a subset ${\mathbb F}_q$ of sufficiently large size. We also use the incidence machinery we develope and arithmetic constructions to study the Erdo…
Let $G$ be an infinite abelian group with $|2G|=|G|$. We show that if $G$ is not the direct sum of a group of exponent 3 and the group of order 2, then $G$ possesses a perfect additive basis; that is, there is a subset $S\subseteq G$ such that every element of $G$ is uniquely representable as a sum of two elements of $S$. Moreover, if $G$ \emph{is} the direct sum of a group of exponent 3 and the group of order 2, then it does not have a perfect additive basis; however, in this case there is a subset $S\subseteq G$ such that every element of $G$ has at most two representations (distinct under p…
Let $G$ be a finite abelian group, and let $m>0$ with $\exp(G)\mid m$. Let $s_{m}(G)$ be the generalized Erdős-Ginzburg-Ziv invariant which denotes the smallest positive integer $d$ such that any sequence of elements in $G$ of length $d$ contains a subsequence of length $m$ with sum zero in $G$. For any integer $r>0$, let $\mathcal{I}_m^{(r)}$ be the collection of all $r$-uniform intersecting families of size $m$. Let $R(\mathcal{I}_m^{(r)},G)$ be the smallest positive integer $d$ such that any $G$-coloring of the edges of the complete $r$-uniform hypergraph $K_{d}^{(r)}$ yields a zero-sum cop…
In this paper, we present a variant of the Balog-Szemerédi-Gowers theorem for the Vinogradov system. We then use our result to deduce a higher degree analogue of the sum-product phenomenon.
We show that under the assumption of a 24-term version of Fermat's Last Theorem, there exists an absolute constant c > 0 such that if S is a set of n > n_0 positive integers satisfying |S.S| < n^(1+c), then the sumset S.S satisfies |S+S| >> n^2. In other words, we prove a weak form of the Erdos-Szemeredi sum-product conjecture, conditional on an extension of Fermat's Last Theorem. Unconditionally, we prove this theorem for when S is a set of n monic polynomials. We also prove an analogue of a theorem of Bourgain and Chang for the ring C[x].
