Related papers: Improved Bound for Tomaszewski's Problem

Let $v_1$, $v_2$, ..., $v_n$ be real numbers whose squares add up to 1. Consider the $2^n$ signed sums of the form $S = \sum \pm v_i$. Boppana and Holzman (2017) proved that at least 13/32 of these sums satisfy $|S| \le 1$. Here we improve…

We prove the following conjecture, due to Tomaszewski (1986): Let $X= \sum_{i=1}^{n} a_{i} x_{i}$, where $\sum_i a_i^2=1$ and each $x_i$ is a uniformly random sign. Then $\Pr[|X|\leq 1] \geq 1/2$. Our main novel tools are local…

Let $v_1$, $v_2$, ..., $v_n$ be real numbers whose squares add up to 1. Consider the $2^n$ signed sums of the form $S = \sum \pm v_i$. Holzman and Kleitman (1992) proved that at least 3/8 of these sums satisfy $|S| \le 1$. This 3/8 bound…

Let $v_1,v_2,...,v_n$ be real numbers whose squares add up to $1$. Consider the $2^n$ signed sums of the form $S=\sum_{i=1}^n \pm v_i.$ Holzman and Kleitman (1992) proved that at least $\frac38=0.375$ of these sums satisfy $|S|\leq 1.$ By…

Let $a_1, \dots, a_n \in \mathbb{R}$ satisfy $\sum_i a_i^2 = 1$, and let $\varepsilon_1, \ldots, \varepsilon_n$ be uniformly random $\pm 1$ signs and $X = \sum_{i=1}^{n} a_i \varepsilon_i$. It is conjectured that $X = \sum_{i=1}^{n} a_i…

The Shapley-Folkman theorem shows that Minkowski averages of uniformly bounded sets tend to be convex when the number of terms in the sum becomes much larger than the ambient dimension. In optimization, Aubin and Ekeland [1976] show that…

The following assertion was equivalent to a conjecture proposed by B. Tomaszewski : Let $C$ be an $n$-dimensional unit cube and let $H$ be a plank of thickness $1$, both are centered at the origin, then no matter how to turn the cube…

The Index Conjecture in zero-sum theory states that when $n$ is coprime to $6$ and $k$ equals $4$, every minimal zero-sum sequence of length $k$ modulo $n$ has index $1$. While other values of $(k,n)$ have been studied thoroughly in the…

For a fixed unit vector $a=(a_1,a_2,\ldots,a_n)\in S^{n-1}$, we consider the $2^n$ sign vectors $\varepsilon=(\varepsilon^1,\varepsilon^2,\ldots,\varepsilon^n)\in \{+1,-1\}^n$ and the corresponding scalar products $\varepsilon\cdot…

More than twenty-five years ago, Manickam, Miklos, and Singhi conjectured that for positive integers $n,k$ with $n \geq 4k$, every set of $n$ real numbers with nonnegative sum has at least $\binom{n-1}{k-1}$ $k$-element subsets whose sum is…

A well-known discovery of Feige's is the following: Let $X_1, \ldots, X_n$ be nonnegative independent random variables, with $\mathbb{E}[X_i] \leq 1 \;\forall i$, and let $X = \sum_{i=1}^n X_i$. Then for any $n$, \[\Pr[X < \mathbb{E}[X] +…

Let $A_1, A_2, \ldots, A_n$ be events in a sample space. Given the probability of the intersection of each collection of up to $k+1$ of these events, what can we say about the probability that at least $r$ of the events occur? This question…

Let $\lambda$ be the Liouville function, defined as $\lambda(n) := (-1)^{\Omega(n)}$ where $\Omega(n)$ is the number of prime factors of $n$ with multiplicity. In 2021, Helfgott and Radziwi{\l}{\l} proved that $$\sum_{n\leq x} \frac{1}{n}…

The Goldbach conjecture states that every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two prime numbers. This conjecture was first proposed by German mathematician Christian Goldbach in 1742 and, despite being obviously true,…

Let $\{a_1, . . . , a_n\}$ be a set of positive integers with $a_1 < \dots < a_n$ such that all $2^n$ subset sums are distinct. A famous conjecture by Erd\H{o}s states that $a_n>c\cdot 2^n$ for some constant $c$, while the best result known…

We obtain new bounds of exponential sums modulo a prime $p$ with binomials $ax^k + bx^n$. In particular, for $k=1$, we improve the bound of Karatsuba (1967) from $O(n^{1/4} p^{3/4})$ to $O\left(p^{3/4} + n^{1/3}p^{2/3}\right)$ for any $n$,…

We prove bounds for the number of solutions to $$a_1 + \dots + a_k = a_1' + \dots + a_k'$$ over $N$-element sets of reals, which are sufficiently convex or near-convex. A near-convex set will be the image of a set with small additive…

The Tu--Deng Conjecture is concerned with the sum of digits $w(n)$ of $n$ in base~$2$ (the Hamming weight of the binary expansion of $n$) and states the following: assume that $k$ is a positive integer and $1\leq t<2^k-1$. Then \[\Bigl…

For the Gauss sums which are defined by S_n(a,q) := \sum_{x (mod q)} e(ax^n/q), Stechkin (1975) conjectured that the quantity A := \sup_{n,q\ge 2} \max_{\gcd(a,q)=1} |S_n(a,q)|/q^(1-1/n) is finite. Shparlinski (1991) proved that A is…

Let $q$ be a power of a prime and let $\mathbb{F}_q$ be the finite field consisting of $q$ elements. We establish new explicit estimates on Gauss sums of the form $S_n(a) = \sum_{x\in \mathbb{F}_q}\psi_a(x^n)$, where $\psi_a$ is a…