Year: 2023
Type: preprint
Abstract: We show that for every positive integer $k$ there are positive constants $C$ and $c$ such that if $A$ is a subset of $\{1, 2, \dots, n\}$ of size at least $C n^{1/k}$, then, for some $d \leq k-1$, the set of subset sums of $A$ contains a homogeneous $d$-dimensional generalized arithmetic progression of size at least $c|A|^{d+1}$. This strengthens a result of Szemerédi and Vu, who proved a similar statement without the homogeneity condition. As an application, we make progress on the Erdős--Straus non-averaging sets problem, showing that every subset $A$ of $\{1, 2, \dots, n\}$ of size at least $n^{\sqrt{2} - 1 + o(1)}$ contains an element which is the average of two or more other elements of $A$. This gives the first polynomial improvement on a result of Erdős and Sárközy from 1990.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Authors: Conlon, David, Fox, Jacob, Pham, Huy Tuan
Institutions: California Institute of Technology, Stanford University
Language: English
Subfield: Discrete Mathematics and Combinatorics
Field: Mathematics
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: National Science Foundation
OpenAlex ID: W4388327661