Sum-free Sets of Integers with a Forbidden Sum
Abstract
A set of integers is sum-free if it contains no solution to the equation . We study sum-free subsets of the set of integers for which the integer cannot be represented as a sum of their elements. We prove a bound of on the number of these sets, which matches, up to a multiplicative constant, the lower bound obtained by considering all subsets of . A main ingredient in the proof is a stability theorem saying that if a subset of of size close to contains only a few subsets that contradict the sum-freeness or the forbidden sum, then it is almost contained in . Our results are motivated by the question of counting symmetric complete sum-free subsets of cyclic groups of prime order. The proofs involve Freiman's theorem, Green's arithmetic removal lemma, and structural results on independent sets in hypergraphs.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1812.09594,
title = {Sum-free Sets of Integers with a Forbidden Sum},
author = {Ishay Haviv},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1812.09594},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
26 pages