Related papers: Squares in sumsets

A word is square-free if it does not contain nonempty factors of the form $XX$. In 1906 Thue proved that there exist arbitrarily long square-free words over a $3$-letter alphabet. It was proved recently [7] that among these words there are…

We prove that every sufficiently large integer $n$ can be written as the sum of a prime and an integer that is not square-free. In addition, we expect this result holds for every $n > 24$ and prove two results to support this claim. First,…

We consider the problem of determining the maximum cardinality of a subset containing no arithmetic progressions of length $k$ in a given set of size $n$. It is proved that it is sufficient, in a certain sense, to consider the interval…

Generalising the Cameron--Erd\H{o}s conjecture to two dimensions, Elsholtz and Rackham conjectured that the number of sum-free subsets of $[n]^2$ is $2^{0.6n^2+O(n)}$. We prove their conjecture.

Erd\H{o}s showed that every set of $n$ positive integers contains a subset of size at least $n/(k+1)$ containing no solutions to $x_1 + \cdots + x_k = y$. We prove that the constant $1/(k+1)$ here is best possible by showing that if $(F_m)$…

Given a matrix $M = (a_{i,j})$ a square is a $2 \times 2$ submatrix with entries $a_{i,j}$, $a_{i, j+s}$, $a_{i+s, j}$, $a_{i+s, j +s}$ for some $s \geq 1$, and a zero-sum square is a square where the entries sum to $0$. Recently,…

In this paper we discuss some of the key properties of sum-free subsets of abelian groups. Our discussion has been designed with a broader readership in mind, and is hence not overly technical. We consider answers to questions like: how…

In 1963, Graham proved that all integers greater than 77 (but not 77 itself) can be partitioned into distinct positive integers whose reciprocals sum to 1. He further conjectured that for any sufficiently large integer, it can be…

Let $A\subseteq \mathbb Z_n$ be a subset. A sequence $S=(x_1,\ldots,x_k)$ in $\mathbb Z_n$ is said to be an $A$-weighted zero-sum sequence if there exist $a_1,\ldots,a_k\in A$ such that $a_1x_1+\cdots+a_kx_k=0$. By a square, we shall mean a…

This paper is concerned with the problem of finding $n$ distinct squares such that, on excluding any one of them, the sum of the remaining $n-1$ squares is a square. While parametric solutions are known when $n=3$ and $n=4$, when $n > 4$,…

We give an upper bound for the exponential sum over squarefree integers. This establishes a conjecture by Br\"udern and Perelli.

A finite subset $A$ of an abelian group $G$ is said to be zero-free if the identity element of $G$ cannot be written as a sum of distinct elements from $A$. In this article we study the structure of zero-free subsets of $Z/pZ$ the…

Every natural number greater than $2$ can be written as the sum of a prime and a square-free number, and recent work has imposed additional divisibility conditions on the square-free number. We overcome limitations in these works to prove…

This paper is concerned with finite sequences of integers that may be written as sums of squares of two nonzero integers. We first find infinitely many integers $n$ such that $n, n+h$ and $n+k$ are all sums of two squares where $h$ and $k$…

A set A is square-difference free (henceforth SDF) if there do not exist x,y\in A, x\ne y, such that |x-y| is a square. Let sdf(n) be the size of the largest SDF subset of {1,...,n}. Ruzsa has shown that sdf(n) = \Omega(n^{0.5(1+ \log_{65}…

Revisiting a $50$-year-old estimate of Choi, Erd\H{o}s and Szemer\'edi, we show that if $A \subseteq \{1, 2, \ldots, 2n\}$ satisfies $|A| \ge n + 1.2 \cdot 10^8$, then there exist five distinct integers whose pairwise sums are all contained…

Let (G, +) be an abelian group. A subset of G is sumfree if it contains no elements x, y, z such that x +y = z. We extend this concept by introducing the Schur degree of a subset of G, where Schur degree 1 corresponds to sumfree. The…

We prove that every integer greater than two may be written as the sum of a prime and a square-free number.

For any fixed $d\geq1$ and subset $X$ of $\mathbb{N}^d$, let $r_X(n)$ be the maximum cardinality of a subset $A$ of $\{1,\dots,n\}^d$ which does not contain a subset of the form $\vec{b} + rX$ for $r>0$ and $\vec{b} \in \mathbb{R}^d$. Such…

For a positive integer $n$, let $[n]$ denote $\{1, \ldots, n\}$. For a 2-dimensional integer lattice point $\mathbf{b}$ and positive integers $k\geq 2$ and $n$, a \textit{$k$-sum $\mathbf{b}$-free set} of $[n]\times [n]$ is a subset $S$ of…