English

An Approximate Counting Version of the Multidimensional Szemer\'edi Theorem

Combinatorics 2023-11-27 v1

Abstract

For any fixed d1d\geq1 and subset XX of Nd\mathbb{N}^d, let rX(n)r_X(n) be the maximum cardinality of a subset AA of {1,,n}d\{1,\dots,n\}^d which does not contain a subset of the form b+rX\vec{b} + rX for r>0r>0 and bRd\vec{b} \in \mathbb{R}^d. Such a set AA is said to be \emph{XX-free}. The Multidimensional Szemer\'edi Theorem of Furstenberg and Katznelson states that rX(n)=o(nd)r_X(n)=o(n^d). We show that, for X3|X|\geq 3 and infinitely many nNn\in\mathbb{N}, the number of XX-free subsets of {1,,n}d\{1,\dots,n\}^d is at most 2O(rX(n))2^{O(r_X(n))}. The proof involves using a known multidimensional extension of Behrend's construction to obtain a supersaturation theorem for copies of XX in dense subsets of [n]d[n]^d for infinitely many values of nn and then applying the powerful hypergraph container lemma. Our result generalizes work of Balogh, Liu, and Sharifzadeh on kk-AP-free sets and Kim on corner-free sets.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2311.13709,
  title  = {An Approximate Counting Version of the Multidimensional Szemer\'edi Theorem},
  author = {Natalie Behague and Joseph Hyde and Natasha Morrison and Jonathan A. Noel and Ashna Wright},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.13709},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

19 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-28T13:29:03.138Z