Arithmetic properties for sparse sequence of integers and its application in number theory, additive combinatorics and ergodic theory

Additive combinatorics is the branch of combinatorics where the objects of study are subsets of the integers or of other abelian groups, and one is interested in properties and patterns that can be expressed in terms of linear equations. More generally, arithmetic combinatorics deals with properties and patterns that can be expressed via additions and multiplications. In the past ten years, it has been an extremely successful area of mathematics, featuring a convergence of techniques from graph theory, analysis and ergodic theory. It has helped prove long-standing open questions in additive number theory, and it offers much promise of future progress. Arithmetic combinatorics has found several applications in computer science, to property testing, PCP constructions, lower bounds, and extractor constructions. Typically, whenever a technique from arithmetic combinatorics becomes understood by computer scientists, it finds some application. Considering that there is still a lot of additive and arithmetic combinatorics that computer scientists do not understand (and, the field being very active, even more will be developed in the near future), there seems to be much potential for future connections and applications.

This thesis presents some contributions in additive combinatorics and arithmetic Ramsey theory. More specifically, it deals with the interaction between combinatorics, number theory and additive combinatorics. This area saw a great improvement with the Szemerédi Regularity Lemma and some of the results that followed. The Regularity Lemma and its consequences have become a widely used tool in graph theory, combinatorics and number theory. Furthermore, its language and point of view has deeply changed the face of additive number theory, a fact universally acknowledged by the Abel award given to Szemerédi in 2012. One of the main reasons for the prize has been Szemerédi's theorem, a result regarding the existence of arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions in dense sets of the integers, the proof of which uses the Regularity Lemma in a key step. One of the earlier consequences of the Regularity Lemma was the Removal Lemma for graphs that was used by Ruzsa and Szemerédi to show Roth theorem, regarding the existence of 3-term arithmetic progressions in dense sets of the integers, in a combinatorial way. The Removal Lemma states that in any graph K with few copies of a subgraph, say a triangle, we can remove few edges from K so that the result contains no copy of the subgraph. This has become a key tool in the applications of the so-called Regularity Method, which has extensive literature in combinatorics, graph theory, number theory and computer science. In 2005 Green introduced a regularity lemma for Abelian groups as well as an algebraic removal lemma. The removal lemma for groups states that, for a given finite Abelian group G, if there are o(|G|^3) solution to x+y+z+t=0 with the variables taking values in S, a subset of G, then we can remove o(|G|) elements from S to make the set S solution-free. The main contributions of this work corresponds to extensions of the removal lemma for groups to either more general contexts, like non-necessary Abelian finite groups, or to linear systems of equations for finite Abelian groups. The main goal is to give a comprehensive and more general framework for many results in additive number theory like Szemerédi Theorem. In particular, we show that the removal lemma for groups by Green can be extended to non-necessary Abelian finite groups. Moreover, we prove a removal lemma for linear systems on finite fields: for every e>0 there exists a d>0 such that if A is a (k x m) linear system of equations with coefficients in a finite field F and the number of solutions to Ax=b, where each variable takes values from a subset Si in F is less than d times |F| raised to m-k, then by removing less than e|F| elements in each Si we can make the resulting sets solution-free, thus solving a conjecture by Green to that respect. Even more, if A is an integer linear system, G is a finite Abelian group, and the determinantal of A and |G| are coprime, then a similar statement holds. Let us mention that the last result allows us to characterize those linear systems where any set S with size proportional to G has a nontrivial solution in S, provided |G| is large enough. This extends the validity of Szmerédi's theorem to finite Abelian groups. These extensions of the removal lemma have been used in arithmetic Ramsey theory to obtain counting results for the number of monochromatic solutions of linear systems. The main result from a work by Frankl, Graham and Rödl in '88 states that the number of monochromatic solutions of regular systems in integer intervals is in fact a positive proportion of the total number of solutions. We give analogous results for solutions in Abelian groups with bounded exponent, for which the main tool in the torsion-free case cannot be applied. Density versions of these counting results are also obtained, in this case with a full characterization.

Let $$D_k$$ denote the maximum degree of regularity of the equation $$x_1+\cdots +x_k-y_1-\cdots -y_k=b_k$$ as $$b_k$$ runs over the positive integers. The Fox and Kleitman conjecture, stating that $$D_k$$ should equal $$2k-1$$ , has been confirmed by Schoen and Taczala (Moscow J. Combin. Number Theory 7 (2017) 79–93). Their proof is achieved by generalizing a theorem of Eberhard et al. (Ann. Math. 180 (2014) 621–652) on sets with doubling constant less than 4. Using much simpler methods and a result of Lev in additive combinatorics, our main result here is that the degree of regularity of the same equation for the specific value $$b_k = c_{k-1} = {{\,\mathrm{lcm}\,}}\{i :i = 1, \dots , k-1\}$$ is at least $$k-1$$ . This shows in a simple and explicit way that $$D_k$$ behaves linearly in k.

This is the proceedings of theworkshop on recent developments in ergodic theory and dynamical systemson March 2011and March 2012 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Thearticles in this volume cover several aspects of vibrant research in ergodic theory and dynamical systems. It contains contributions to Teichmuller dynamics, interval exchange transformations, continued fractions, return times averages, Furstenberg Fractals, fractal geometry of non-uniformly hyperbolic horseshoes, convergence along the sequence of squares, adic and horocycle flows, and topological flows. These contributions illustrate the connections between ergodic theory and dynamical systems, number theory, harmonic analysis, probability, andalgebra. Two surveys are included which give a nice introduction for interested young or senior researcher to some active research areas. Overall this volume provides a very useful blend of techniques and methods as well as directions of research on general convergence phenomena in ergodic theory and dynamical systems.

The degrees-of-freedom of a K-user Gaussian interference channel (GIFC) has been defined to be the multiple of (1/2) log <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sub> P at which the maximum sum of achievable rates grows with increasing P. In this paper, we establish that the degrees-of-freedom of three or more user, real, scalar GIFCs, viewed as a function of the channel coefficients, is discontinuous at points where all of the coefficients are non-zero rational numbers. More specifically, for all K > 2, we find a class of K-user GIFCs that is dense in the GIFC parameter space for which K/2 degrees-of-freedom are exactly achievable, and we show that the degrees-of-freedom for any GIFC with non-zero rational coefficients is strictly smaller than K/2. These results are proved using new connections with number theory and additive combinatorics.

The study of geodesic flows on homogenous spaces is an area of research that has yielded some fascinating developments. This book, first published in 2000, focuses on many of these, and one of its highlights is an elementary and complete proof (due to Margulis and Dani) of Oppenheim's conjecture. Also included here: an exposition of Ratner's work on Raghunathan's conjectures; a complete proof of the Howe-Moore vanishing theorem for general semisimple Lie groups; a new treatment of Mautner's result on the geodesic flow of a Riemannian symmetric space; Mozes' result about mixing of all orders and the asymptotic distribution of lattice points in the hyperbolic plane; Ledrappier's example of a mixing action which is not a mixing of all orders. The treatment is as self-contained and elementary as possible. It should appeal to graduate students and researchers interested in dynamical systems, harmonic analysis, differential geometry, Lie theory and number theory

Ergodic Theory on Homogeneous Spaces and Metric Number Theory

This workshop in real and harmonic analysis surveyed recent investigations in areas including geometric measure theory and restriction theory, multiple ergodic averages, local smoothing estimates, Schrödinger and Hörmander-type oscillatory integral operators, multilinear estimates and analysis on the Hamming cube. In particular, the workshop emphasized the recent solutions of two longstanding problems: the Kakeya phenomenon in dimension three, and almost everywhere convergence of long time averages associated to multiple commuting measure-preserving transformations. The methods presented during the workshop have yielded applications in ergodic theory, number theory, and computer science.

Schmidt games and the Cantor winning property give alternative notions of largeness, similar to the more standard notions of measure and category. Being intuitive, flexible, and applicable to recent research made them an active object of study. We survey the definitions of the most common variants and connections between them. A new game called the Cantor game is invented and helps with presenting a unifying framework. We prove surprising new results such as the coincidence of absolute winning and $1$ Cantor winning in metric spaces, and the fact that $1/2$ winning implies absolute winning for subsets of $\mathbb {R}$ . We also suggest a prototypical example of a Cantor winning set to show the ubiquity of such sets in metric number theory and ergodic theory.

In this paper, we introduce and study theα-Farey map and its associated jump transformation, theα-Lüroth map, for an arbitrary countable partitionαof the unit interval with atoms which accumulate only at the origin. These maps represent linearized generalizations of the Farey map and the Gauss map from elementary number theory. First, a thorough analysis of some of their topological and ergodic theoretical properties is given, including establishing exactness for both types of these maps. The first main result then is to establish weak and strong renewal laws for what we have calledα-sum-level sets for theα-Lüroth map. Similar results have previously been obtained for the Farey map and the Gauss map by using infinite ergodic theory. In this respect, a side product of the paper is to allow for greater transparency of some of the core ideas of infinite ergodic theory. The second remaining result is to obtain a complete description of the Lyapunov spectra of theα-Farey map and theα-Lüroth map in terms of the thermodynamical formalism. We show how to derive these spectra and then give various examples which demonstrate the diversity of their behaviours in dependence on the chosen partitionα.

We consider the following problem: given the set of residues modulo p of all divisors of some squarefree number n, can we find efficiently a small set of residues containing all residues coming from prime factors? We present an algorithm which solves this problem for p and n satisfying some natural conditions and show that there are plenty of such numbers. One interesting feature of the proof is that it relies on additive combinatorics. We also give some application of this result to algorithmic number theory.

On a girth–free variant of the Bourgain–Gamburd machine

A retrospective on 60 years of approximation theory and associated fields

Book Review: Recurrence in ergodic theory and combinatorial number theory

Unique expansions of real numbers