Breaking the logarithmic barrier in Roth's theorem

Abstract: We present an improvement to Roth's theorem on arithmetic progressions, implying the first non-trivial case of a conjecture of Erdős: if a subset A of {1,2,3,...} is not too sparse, in that the sum of its reciprocals diverges, then A must contain infinitely many three-term arithmetic progressions. Although a problem in number theory and combinatorics on the surface, it turns out to have fascinating links with geometry, harmonic analysis and probability, and we shall aim to give something of a flavour of this.

number theory

Audience: researchers in the topic

CRM-CICMA Québec Vermont Seminar Series

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