Related papers: The popularity gap

Let $\BZ_p$ be the finite field of prime order $p$ and $A$ be a subset of $\BZ_p$. We prove several sharp results about the following two basic questions: (1) When can one represent zero as a sum of distinct elements of $A$ ? (2) When can…

We consider the representation of primes as a sum of a prime and twice a triangular number. We prove that a subset of the primes having density 1 is expressible in this form. We conjecture that every odd prime number is expressible as a sum…

We prove in Theorem $2.2$ that the multiplicatively closed subset generated by at most two elements in the set of natural numbers $\mathbb{N}$ has arbitrarily large gaps by explicitly constructing large integer intervals with known prime…

Let $A$ be a set and $f:A\rightarrow A$ a bijective function. Necessary and sufficient conditions on $f$ are determined which makes it possible to endow $A$ with a binary operation $*$ such that $(A,*)$ is a cyclic group and $f\in…

A set ${\cal A} \subseteq \Set{1,...,N}$ is of type $B_2$ if all sums $a+b$, with $a\ge b$, $a,b\in {\cal A}$, are distinct. It is well known that the largest such set is of size asymptotic to $N^{1/2}$. For a $B_2$ set ${\cal A}$ of this…

Let $A$ be a subset of primes up to $x$. If we assume $A$ is well-distributed (in the Siegel-Walfisz sense) in any arithmetic progressions to moduli $q\leqslant(\log x)^c$ for any $c>0$, then the sumset $A+A$ has density 1/2 in the natural…

Let $A$ be a finite nilpotent group acting fixed point freely on the finite (solvable) group $G$ by automorphisms. It is conjectured that the nilpotent length of $G$ is bounded above by $\ell(A)$, the number of primes dividing the order of…

Let $r(k,A,n)$ denote the number of representations of $n$ as a sum of $k$ elements of a set $A \subseteq \mathbb{N}$. In 2002, Dombi conjectured that if $A$ is co-infinite, then the sequence $(r(k,A,n))_{n \geq 0}$ cannot be strictly…

We show that for every integer $d$, there is a constant $N(d)$ such that if $K$ is any field and $F$ is a finite subset of $GL_d(K)$, which generates a non amenable subgroup, then $F^{N(d)}$ contains two elements, which freely generate a…

Let A be a subset of a group G = (G,.). We will survey the theory of sets A with the property that |A.A| <= K|A|, where A.A = {a_1 a_2 : a_1, a_2 in A}. The case G = (Z,+) is the famous Freiman--Ruzsa theorem.

Let $A$ be a non-zero abelian variety over a field $F$ that is not algebraic over a finite field. We prove that the rational rank of the abelian group $A(F)$ is infinite when $F$ is large in the sense of Pop (also called ample). The main…

L. Babai has shown that a faithful permutation representation of a nonsplit extension of a group by an alternating group $A_k$ must have degree at least $k^2(\frac{1}{2}-o(1))$, and has asked how sharp this lower bound is. We prove that…

We introduce a new real valued invariant for finitely presented groups called residual deficiency. Its main property is the following. Let G be a finitely presented group. If the residual deficiency of G is greater than one, then G has a…

A variety of groups does not contain all metabelian groups if and only if there is an absolute bound for the nilpotency classes of powerful $p$-groups in the given variety. Similarly, a variety contains only finitely many finite $p$-groups…

We show that for any finitely generated group of matrices that is not virtually solvable, there is an integer m such that, given an arbitrary finite generating set for the group, one may find two elements a and b that are both products of…

For a set $A$ of $k$ elements from an additive abelian group $G$ and a positive integer $r \leq k$, we consider the set of elements of $G$ that can be written as a sum of $h$ elements of $A$ with at least $r$ distinct elements. We denote…

Let $G$ be a finite group and $P$ a Sylow $2$-subgroup of $G$. We obtain both asymptotic and explicit bounds for the number of odd-degree irreducible complex representations of $G$ in terms of the size of the abelianization of $P$. To do…

Let $t\geq 1$, let $A$ and $B$ be finite, nonempty subsets of an abelian group $G$, and let $A\pp{i} B$ denote all the elements $c$ with at least $i$ representations of the form $c=a+b$, with $a\in A$ and $b\in B$. For $|A|, |B|\geq t$, we…

Let $H$ be an abelian subgroup of a finite group $G$ and $\pi$ the set of prime divisors of $|H|$. We prove that $|H O_{\pi}(G)/ O_{\pi}(G)|$ is bounded above by the largest character degree of $G$. A similar result is obtained when $H$ is…

Let $G$ be a nonabelian group. We say that $G$ has an abelian partition, if there exists a partition of $G$ into commuting subsets $A_1, A_2, \ldots, A_n$ of $G$, such that $|A_i|\geqslant 2$ for each $i=1, 2, \ldots, n$. This paper…