English

A Variant of The Corners Theorem

Combinatorics 2023-06-22 v2

Abstract

The Corners Theorem states that for any α>0\alpha > 0 there exists an N0N_0 such that for any abelian group GG with G=NN0|G| = N \geq N_0 and any subset AG×GA \subset G \times G with AαN2|A| \ge \alpha N^2 we can find a corner in AA , i.e. there exist x,y,dGx, y, d \in G with d0d \neq 0 such that (x,y),(x+d,y),(x,y+d)A(x, y), (x+d, y), (x, y+d) \in A. Here, we consider a stronger version: given such a group GG and subset AA, for each dGd \in G we define Sd={(x,y)G×G:(x,y),(x+d,y),(x,y+d)A}S_d = \{(x, y) \in G \times G : (x, y), (x+d, y), (x, y+d) \in A \} . So Sd|S_d| is the number of corners of size dd. Is it true that, provided NN is sufficiently large, there must exist some dG{0}d \in G \setminus \{0\} such that Sd>(α3ϵ)N2|S_d|> (\alpha^3 - \epsilon ) N^2 ? We answer this question in the negative. We do this by relating the problem to a much simpler-looking problem about random variables. Then, using this link, we show that there are sets AA with Sd<Cα3.13N2|S_d| < C\alpha^{3.13} N^2 for all d0d \neq 0, where CC is an absolute constant. We also show that in the special case where G=F2nG = \mathbb{F}_2^n, one can always find a dd with Sd>(α4ϵ)N2|S_d|> (\alpha^4 - \epsilon ) N^2.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1804.03972,
  title  = {A Variant of The Corners Theorem},
  author = {Matei Mandache},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.03972},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

17 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-23T01:20:27.677Z