English

Discrepancy of Arithmetic Progressions in Boxes and Convex Bodies

Combinatorics 2026-01-27 v2 Discrete Mathematics

Abstract

The combinatorial discrepancy of arithmetic progressions inside [N]:={1,,N}[N] := \{1, \ldots, N\} is the smallest integer DD for which [N][N] can be colored with two colors so that any arithmetic progression in [N][N] contains at most DD more elements from one color class than the other. Bounding the discrepancy of such set systems is a classical problem in discrepancy theory. More recently, this problem was generalized to arithmetic progressions in grids like [N]d[N]^d (Valk{\'o}) and [N1]××[Nd][N_1]\times \ldots \times [N_d] (Fox, Xu, and Zhou). In the latter setting, Fox, Xu, and Zhou gave upper and lower bounds on the discrepancy that match within a logΩloglogΩ\frac{\log |\Omega|}{\log \log |\Omega|} factor, where Ω:=[N1]××[Nd]\Omega := [N_1]\times \ldots \times [N_d] is the ground set. In this work, we use the connection between factorization norms and discrepancy to improve their upper bound to be within a logΩ\sqrt{\log|\Omega|} factor from the lower bound. We also generalize Fox, Xu, and Zhou's lower bound, and our upper bounds to arithmetic progressions in arbitrary convex bodies.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2504.12598,
  title  = {Discrepancy of Arithmetic Progressions in Boxes and Convex Bodies},
  author = {Lily Li and Aleksandar Nikolov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.12598},
  year   = {2026}
}