Related papers: Sets of integers with no large sum-free subset
In 1946, P. Erd\H os and I. Niven proved that there are only finitely many positive integers $n$ for which one or more elementary symmetric functions of $1, 1/2, \ldots , 1/n$ are integers. In this paper we solve this old problem by showing…
Three types of Cantor sets are studied.For any integer $m\ge 4$, we show that every real number in $[0,k]$ is the sum of at most $k$ $m$-th powers of elements in the Cantor ternary set $C$ for some positive integer $k$, and the smallest…
We prove that the set of long cycles has the edge-Erd\H{o}s-P\'osa property: for every fixed integer $\ell\ge 3$ and every $k\in\mathbb{N}$, every graph $G$ either contains $k$ edge-disjoint cycles of length at least $\ell$ (long cycles) or…
In this paper we establish connections between covers of $\mathbb Z$ by residue classes and subset sums in a field. Suppose that $A_0=\{a_s(n_s)\}_{s=0}^k$ covers each integer at least $p$ times with the residue class…
A Sidon set is a set of the positive integers such that the sums of two pairs is not repeated. I. Ruzsa gave a probabilistic construction of an infinite Sidon set. In this work we present the details of a simplified proof of this…
Let U be a numeration system, a set X of integers is U-star-free if the set made up of the U-representations of the elements in X is a star-free regular language. Answering a question of A. de Luca and A. Restivo, we obtain a complete…
Let $p$ be a prime. We define $S(p)$ the smallest number $k$ such that every positive integer is a sum of at most $k$ squares of integers that are not divisible by $p$. In this article, we prove that $S(2)=10$, $S(3)=6$, $S(5)=5$, and…
Let $G$ be an additive abelian group and $S\subset G$ a subset. Let $\Sigma(S)$ denote the set of group elements which can be expressed as a sum of a nonempty subset of $S$. We say $S$ is zero-sum free if $0 \not\in \Sigma(S)$. It was…
Let $A, B\subseteq \mathbb{R}^2$ be finite, nonempty subsets, let $s\geq 2$ be an integer, and let $h_1(A,B)$ denote the minimal number $t$ such that there exist $2t$ (not necessarily distinct) parallel lines,…
Let g be the element that is the sum of x^(n^2) for n >= 0 of A=Z/2[[x]], and let B consist of all n for which the coefficient of x^n in 1/g is 1. (The elements of B are the entries 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 13, ... in A108345; see The…
We prove that there is a small but fixed positive integer e such that for every prime larger than a fixed integer, every subset S of the integers modulo p which satisfies |2S|<(2+e)|S| and 2(|2S|)-2|S|+2 < p is contained in an arithmetic…
We construct subsets of {1,...,N} of cardinality at least N exp(-C(log N)^{1/(k+1)}) which do not contain arithmetic progressions of length 2^k+1. This extends a result of Behrend (1946) concerning sets which do not contain aritmetic…
A set is introreducible if it can be computed by every infinite subset of itself. Such a set can be thought of as coding information very robustly. We investigate introreducible sets and related notions. Our two main results are that the…
Let $C_n$ be a cyclic group of order $n$. A sequence $S$ of length $\ell$ over $C_n$ is a sequence $S = a_1\boldsymbol\cdot a_2\boldsymbol\cdot \ldots\boldsymbol\cdot a_{\ell}$ of $\ell$ elements in $C_n$, where a repetition of elements is…
A cap set in $\mathbb{F}_3^n$ is a subset that contains no three elements adding to 0. Building on a construction of Edel, a recent paper of Tyrrell gave the first improvement to the lower bound for a size of a cap set in two decades…
Erdos and Niven proved that for any positive integers $m$ and $d$, there are only finitely many positive integers $n$ for which one or more of the elementary symmetric functions of $1/m,1/(m+d), ..., 1/(m+nd)$ are integers. Recently, Chen…
A cornerstone result of Erd\H os, Ginzburg, and Ziv (EGZ) states that any sequence of $2n-1$ elements in $\mathbb{Z}/n$ contains a zero-sum subsequence of length $n$. While algebraic techniques have predominated in deriving many deep…
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…
This article considers the positive integers $N$ for which $\zeta_{N}(s) = \sum_{n=1}^{N} n^{-s}$ has zeroes in the half-plane $\Re(s)>1$. Building on earlier results, we show that there are no zeroes for $1\leq N\leq 18$ and for $N=20, 21,…
It is well-known that for a prime $p\equiv 2\pmod 3$ and integer $n\ge 1$, the maximum possible size of a sum-free subset of the elementary abelian group $\mathbb Z_p^n$ is $\frac13\,(p+1)p^{n-1}$. We establish a matching stability result…