Edi Theorem Research Articles

A transference principle for systems of linear equations, and applications to almost twin primes

The transference principle of Green and Tao enabled various authors to transfer Szemer\'edi'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 primes the existence of solutions to finite complexity systems of linear equations is determined by natural local conditions. These applications rely on a recent work of the last two authors on Bombieri-Vinogradov type estimates for nilsequences.

Ergodic theorems for nonconventional arrays and an extension of the Szemerédi theorem

The paper is primarily concerned with the asymptotic behavior as $N\to\infty$ of averages of nonconventional arrays having the form $N^{-1}\sum_{n=1}^N\prod_{j=1}^\ell T^{P_j(n,N)}f_j$ where $f_j$'s are bounded measurable functions, $T$ is an invertible measure preserving transformation and $P_j$'s are polynomials of $n$ and $N$ taking on integer values on integers. It turns out that when $T$ is weakly mixing and $P_j(n,N)=p_jn+q_jN$ are linear or, more generally, have the form $P_j(n,N)=P_j(n)+Q_j(N)$ for some integer valued polynomials $P_j$ and $Q_j$ then the above averages converge in $L^2$ but for general polynomials $P_j$ the $L^2$ convergence can be ensured even in the case $\ell=1$ only when $T$ is strongly mixing. Studying also weakly mixing and compact extensions and relying on Furstenberg's structure theorem we derive an extension of Szemer\' edi's theorem saying that for any subset of integers $\Lambda$ with positive upper density there exists a subset $\mathcal N_\Lambda$ of positive integers having uniformly bounded gaps such that for $N\in\mathcal N_\Lambda$ and at least $\varepsilon N,\,\varepsilon>0$ of $n$'s all numbers $p_jn+q_jN,\, j=1,...,\ell$ belong to $\Lambda$. We obtain also a version of these results for several commuting transformations which yields a corresponding extension of the multidimensional Szemer\' edi theorem.

Quantitative bounds in the polynomial Szemerédi theorem: the homogeneous case

We obtain quantitative bounds in the polynomial Szemer\'edi theorem of Bergelson and Leibman, provided the polynomials are homogeneous and of the same degree. Such configurations include arithmetic progressions with common difference equal to a perfect kth power.

Combinatorial theorems in sparse random sets

We develop a new technique that allows us to show in a unified way that many well-known combinatorial theorems, including Tur\'an's theorem, Szemer\'edi's theorem and Ramsey's theorem, hold almost surely inside sparse random sets. For instance, we extend Tur\'an's theorem to the random setting by showing that for every $\epsilon > 0$ and every positive integer $t \geq 3$ there exists a constant $C$ such that, if $G$ is a random graph on $n$ vertices where each edge is chosen independently with probability at least $C n^{-2/(t+1)}$, then, with probability tending to $1$ as $n$ tends to infinity, every subgraph of $G$ with at least $(1 - \frac{1}{t-1} + \epsilon) e(G)$ edges contains a copy of $K_t$. This is sharp up to the constant $C$. We also show how to prove sparse analogues of structural results, giving two main applications, a stability version of the random Tur\'an theorem stated above and a sparse hypergraph removal lemma. Many similar results have recently been obtained independently in a different way by Schacht and by Friedgut, R\"odl and Schacht.

Extremal results for random discrete structures

We study thresholds for extremal properties of random discrete structures. We determine the threshold for Szemer\'edi's theorem on arithmetic progressions in random subsets of the integers and its multidimensional extensions and we determine the threshold for Tur\'an-type problems for random graphs and hypergraphs. In particular, we verify a conjecture of Kohayakawa, \L uczak, and R\"odl for Tur\'an-type problems in random graphs. Similar results were obtained by Conlon and Gowers.

Sets of unit vectors with small subset sums

We say that a family ${x_i|i\in[m]}$ of vectors in a Banach space $X$ satisfies the $k$-collapsing condition if $|\sum_{i\in I}x_i|\leq 1$ for all $k$-element subsets $I\subseteq{1,2,...,m}$. Let $C(k,d)$ denote the maximum cardinality of a $k$-collapsing family of unit vectors in a $d$\dimensional Banach space, where the maximum is taken over all spaces of dimension $d$. Similarly, let $CB(k,d)$ denote the maximum cardinality if we require in addition that $\sum_{i=1}^m x_i=o$. The case $k=2$ was considered by F\"uredi, Lagarias and Morgan (1991). These conditions originate in a theorem of Lawlor and Morgan (1994) on geometric shortest networks in smooth finite-dimensional Banach spaces. We show that $CB(k,d)=\max{k+1,2d}$ for all $k,d\geq 2$. The behaviour of $C(k,d)$ is not as simple, and we derive various upper and lower bounds for various ranges of $k$ and $d$. These include the exact values $C(k,d)=\max{k+1,2d}$ in certain cases. We use a variety of tools from graph theory, convexity and linear algebra in the proofs: in particular the Hajnal-Szemer\'edi Theorem, the Brunn-Minkowski inequality, and lower bounds for the rank of a perturbation of the identity matrix.

A short proof of the multidimensional Szemerédi theorem in the primes

Tao conjectured that every dense subset of ${\mathcal P}^d$, the $d$-tuples of primes, contains constellations of any given shape. This was very recently proved by Cook, Magyar, and Titichetrakun and independently by Tao and Ziegler. Here we give a simple proof using the Green-Tao theorem on linear equations in primes and the Furstenberg-Katznelson multidimensional Szemer\'edi theorem.

A relative Szemerédi theorem

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 Szemer\'edi 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 Szemer\'edi theorem, showing that a much weaker pseudorandomness condition is sufficient. Our strengthened version can be applied to give the first relative Szemer\'edi theorem for $k$-term arithmetic progressions in pseudorandom subsets of $\mathbb{Z}_N$ of density $N^{-c_k}$. The key component in our proof is an extension of the regularity method to sparse pseudorandom hypergraphs, which we believe to be interesting in its own right. From this we derive a relative extension of the hypergraph removal lemma. This is a strengthening of an earlier theorem used by Tao in his proof that the Gaussian primes contain arbitrarily shaped constellations and, by standard arguments, allows us to deduce the relative Szemer\'edi theorem.

Sub-Ramsey Numbers for Arithmetic Progressions

Let the integers $1,\ldots,n$ be assigned colors. Szemer\'edi's theorem implies that if there is a dense color class then there is an arithmetic progression of length three in that color. We study the conditions on the color classes forcing totally multicolored arithmetic progressions of length 3. Let $f(n)$ be the smallest integer $k$ such that there is a coloring of $\{1, \ldots, n\}$ without totally multicolored arithmetic progressions of length three and such that each color appears on at most $k$ integers. We provide an exact value for $f(n)$ when $n$ is sufficiently large, and all extremal colorings. In particular, we show that $f(n)= 8n/17 + O(1)$. This completely answers a question of Alon, Caro and Tuza.

Szemer'edi's regularity lemma revisited

Szemer'edi's regularity lemma is a basic tool in graph theory, and also plays an important role in additive combinatorics, most notably in proving Szemer\'edi's theorem on arithmetic progressions . In this note we revisit this lemma from the perspective of probability theory and information theory instead of graph theory, and observe a variant of this lemma which introduces a new parameter $F$. This stronger version of the regularity lemma was iterated in a recent paper of the author to reprove the analogous regularity lemma for hypergraphs.