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Structure and arithmetic in sets

University of British Columbia

We prove results in arithmetic combinatorics involving sums of prime numbers and also some variants of the Erdös-Szemerédi sum-product phenomenon. In particular, we prove nontrivial lower bounds on the density in the integers of the sumset of a positive relative density subset of the primes. The proof of this result uses Green and Green-Tao pseudorandomness arguments to reduce the problem to an analogous statement for relatively dense subsets of the multiplicative subgroup of integers modulo a large integer N. The latter statement is resolved with a combinatorial argument which bounds high moments of a representation function. We also show that if two distinct sets A and B of complex numbers have very small productset, then they produce maximally large iterated sumsets. This uses an algebraic concept of the multiplicative dimension of a finite set. As an application of the case A=B, we obtain a quantitative version of a result of Chang on sums and products of distinct complex elements.

Text

2011-04-15

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/33674

Mathematics

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/