Largest Sidon subsets in weak Sidon sets
Abstract
A finite set is called a Sidon set if all sums with and are distinct, and a weak Sidon set if all sums with and are distinct. For a finite set , let denote the maximum size of a Sidon subset of , and define S\'ark\"ozy and S\'os asked whether the limit exists and, if so, to determine its value. We resolve this problem completely by determining exactly: In particular, . We also investigate a related problem of Erd\H{o}s concerning a local difference condition. A finite set is called a -set if every -element subset of determines at least five distinct values among its six pairwise absolute differences. Erd\H{o}s asked for the optimal constant such that every -set of size contains a Sidon subset of size at least . Gy\'arf\'as and Lehel reduced this to an extremal problem of -uniform hypergraphs and proved . We improve both bounds by establishing where the lower bound uses a reformulation of the extremal problem, and the upper bound follows from an explicit construction together with a convenient characterization of .
Cite
@article{arxiv.2602.23282,
title = {Largest Sidon subsets in weak Sidon sets},
author = {Jie Ma and Quanyu Tang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.23282},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
15 pages. This is the submitted version