Generalizations of product-free subsets
Abstract
For any group G of order n, a subset A of G is said to be product-free if there is no solution of the equation ab=c with a,b,c in A. Previous results of Gowers showed that the size of any product-free subset of G is at most n/d^(1/3), where d is the smallest dimension of a nontrivial representation of G. However, this upper bound does not match the best lower bound. We will generalize the upper bound to the case of product-poor subsets A, in which the equation ab=c is allowed to have a few solutions with a,b,c in A. We prove that the upper bound for the size of product-poor subsets matches the best lower bound in many families of groups. We will also generalize the concept of product-free to the case in which we have many subsets of a group, and different constraints about products of the elements in the subsets.
Cite
@article{arxiv.0804.0687,
title = {Generalizations of product-free subsets},
author = {Kiran S. Kedlaya and Xuancheng Shao},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0804.0687},
year = {2008}
}
Comments
8 pages; from conference "Communicating Mathematics" in honor of Joe Gallian (Duluth, 2007); related to 0708.2295