English

Product sets cannot contain long arithmetic progressions

Number Theory 2014-05-20 v3

Abstract

Let BB be a set of natural numbers of size nn. We prove that the length of the longest arithmetic progression contained in the product set B.B={bbb,bB}B.B = \{bb'| \, b, b' \in B\} cannot be greater than O(nlog2nloglogn)O(\frac{n\log^2 n}{\log \log n}) and present an example of a product set containing an arithmetic progression of length Ω(nlogn)\Omega(n \log n). For sets of complex numbers we obtain the upper bound O(n3/2)O(n^{3/2}).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1305.4416,
  title  = {Product sets cannot contain long arithmetic progressions},
  author = {Dmitry Zhelezov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1305.4416},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

The previous version contained an error in the complex case. This is a corrected version with a weaker bound $n^{3/2}$ for sets of complex numbers and will appear in Acta Arithmetica

R2 v1 2026-06-22T00:18:54.507Z