Related papers: Improving Behrend's construction: Sets without ari…

Capsets are subsets of $\mathbb{F}_3^n$ with no three points on a line and a capset is complete if it is not a subset of a larger capset. We study some new constructions of capsets via algebraic equations over extensions of $\mathbb{F}_3$.…

We provide a monotone non increasing sequence of upper bounds $f^H_k$ ($k\ge 1$) converging to the global minimum of a polynomial $f$ on simple sets like the unit hypercube. The novelty with respect to the converging sequence of upper…

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…

An improved upper bound is obtained for the density of sequences of positive integers that contain no k-term geometric progression.

One of the main problems of the research area of network coding is to compute good lower and upper bounds of the achievable cardinality of so-called subspace codes in $\operatorname{PG}(n,q)$, i.e., the set of subspaces of $\mathbb{F}_q^n$,…

We prove that if $B$ is a set of $N$ positive integers such that $B\cdot B$ contains an arithmetic progression of length $M$, then for some absolute $C > 0$, $$ \pi(M) + C \frac {M^{2/3}}{\log^2 M} \leq N, $$ where $\pi$ is the prime…

Motivated by applications to matrix multiplication algorithms, Pratt asked (ITCS'24) how large a subset of $[n] \times [n]$ could be without containing a skew-corner: three points $(x,y), (x,y+h),(x+h,y')$ with $h \ne 0$. We prove any skew…

Fix a prime $p\geq 11$. We show that there exists a positive integer $m$ such that any subset of $\mathbb{F}_p^n\times\mathbb{F}_p^n$ containing no nontrivial configurations of the form $(x,y),(x,y+z),(x,y+2z),(x+z,y)$ must have density…

Let $P(n)$ be the number of polyominoes of $n$ cells and $\lambda$ be Klarner's constant, that is, $\lambda=\lim_{n\to\infty} \sqrt[n]{P(n)}$. We show that there exist some positive numbers $A,T$, so that for every $n$ \[ P(n) \ge…

For a given subset $A\subseteq \mathbb F_q^*$, we study the problem of finding a large packing set $B$ of $A$, that is, a set $B \subseteq \mathbb F_q^*$ such that $|AB|=|A||B|$. We prove the existence of such a $B$ of size $|B|\ge…

We use Grothendieck's dessins d'enfant to show that if $P$ and $Q$ are two real polynomials, any real function of the form $x^\alpha(1-x)^{\beta} P - Q$, has at most $\deg P +\deg Q + 2$ roots in the interval $]0,~1[$. As a consequence, we…

Let $q$ be an odd prime power. Combining the discussion of Varnavides and a recent theorem of Ellenberg and Gijswijt, we show that a subset $A\subset{\mathbb F}_q^n$ will contain many non-trivial three-term arithmetic progressions, whenever…

In this paper we prove: If 0 < d < 1, and p is a sufficiently large prime, then if S is a subset of Z/pZ having the least number of three-term arithmetic progressions among all subsets of Z/pZ having at least dp elements, then S has an…

The union-closed sets conjecture states that in any nonempty union-closed family $\mathcal{F}$ of subsets of a finite set, there exists an element contained in at least a proportion $1/2$ of the sets of $\mathcal{F}$. Using the…

This paper is mainly concerned with sets which do not contain four-term arithmetic progressions, but are still very rich in three term arithmetic progressions, in the sense that all sufficiently large subsets contain at least one such…

We show strong (and surprisingly simple) lower bounds for weakly learning intersections of halfspaces in the improper setting. Strikingly little is known about this problem. For instance, it is not even known if there is a polynomial-time…

We show that any Algebraic Branching Program (ABP) computing the polynomial $\sum_{i = 1}^n x_i^n$ has at least $\Omega(n^2)$ vertices. This improves upon the lower bound of $\Omega(n\log n)$, which follows from the classical result of Baur…

Let $B$ be a set of natural numbers of size $n$. We prove that the length of the longest arithmetic progression contained in the product set $B.B = \{bb'| \, b, b' \in B\}$ cannot be greater than $O(n \log n)$ which matches the lower bound…

A skew corner is a triple of points in $\mathbb{Z} \times \mathbb{Z}$ of the form $(x,y), (x, y + a)$ and $(x + a, y')$. Pratt posed the following question: how large can a set $A \subseteq [n] \times [n]$ be, provided it contains no…

An open problem that is widely regarded as one of the most important in quantum query complexity is to resolve the quantum query complexity of the k-distinctness function on inputs of size N. While the case of k=2 (also called Element…