English

Sharp bound for the Erd\H{o}s-Straus non-averaging set problem

Combinatorics 2025-09-11 v2 Number Theory

Abstract

A set of integers AA is non-averaging if there is no element aa in AA which can be written as an average of a subset of AA not containing aa. We show that the largest non-averaging subset of {1,,n}\{1, \ldots, n\} has size n1/4+o(1)n^{1/4+o(1)}, thus solving the Erd\H{o}s-Straus problem. We also determine the largest size of a non-averaging set in a dd-dimensional box for any fixed dd. Our main tool includes the structure theorem for the set of subset sums due to Conlon, Fox and the first author, together with a result about the structure of a point set in nearly convex position.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2410.14624,
  title  = {Sharp bound for the Erd\H{o}s-Straus non-averaging set problem},
  author = {Huy Tuan Pham and Dmitrii Zakharov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.14624},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Revised version, 20 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-28T19:27:33.725Z