English

How Many Reflections Make a Dihedral Set Large?

Group Theory 2026-03-25 v1 Combinatorics

Abstract

Given a size-kk subset SS of a group GG, how large can the product set SnS^n be? We study this question, at several layers of refinement, for the infinite dihedral group. First, we give an explicit formula for the maximum size of SnS^n among all size-kk subsets with a prescribed number of reflections. We then determine the optimal number of reflections that a size-kk set should contain in order to maximize Sn|S^n|. When kk is fixed and nn\to\infty, we obtain a clean asymptotic expression for the maximal size of SnS^n. Moreover, we compute this asymptotic separately for each fixed number of reflections in SS. We show that the number of reflections influences the asymptotic size of SnS^n only through a multiplicative coefficient, which admits a direct probabilistic interpretation. Finally, we compute the growth exponent of the maximum of Sn|S^n| when~k= nk=~n.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.22533,
  title  = {How Many Reflections Make a Dihedral Set Large?},
  author = {Be'eri Greenfeld and George King and Xiaoxuan Li and Sam Tacheny},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.22533},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

This project has originated from the Washington eXperimental Math Lab (WXML) at the University of Washington under the mentorship of the first-named author

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:34:23.996Z