On creating sets with large lower density (Q915760): Difference between revisions

Given a subset A of \({\mathbb{N}}\), the upper density \(\bar d(A)\) of A is defined by \(\bar d(A)=\lim_{n\to \infty}\sup | A\cap \hat n|\) and the corresponding lower density \(\underline{d}(A)\) by \(\lim_{n\to \infty}\inf | A\cap \hat n|\) where \(\hat n\) denotes the set \(\{1,2,...,n\}\). In addition, the author defines the Banach density \(d^*(A)\) by \(d^*(A)=\sup \{\alpha:\) for each \(n\in {\mathbb{N}}\), \(\exists n\in {\mathbb{N}}\cup \{0\}\) and \(r\in {\mathbb{N}}\) with \(r\geq m\) such that \(| A\cap \{n+1,n+2,...,n+r\}| \geq \alpha r\}\). Thus \(d^*(A)>\alpha\) indicates that there are arbitrarily long blocks of \({\mathbb{N}}\) in each of which a fraction of at least \(\alpha\) of the elements belong to A. Trivially, one has that \(\underline{d}(A)\leq \bar d(A)\leq d^*(A).\) The author's main result is the following theorem which is also shown to be best possible: Let \(A\subseteq {\mathbb{N}}\) such that \(d^*(A)=\gamma >0\) and \(\underline{d}(A)=\alpha\). Then for all \(\epsilon >0\) there exists \(b\in {\mathbb{N}}\) with \[ \underline{d}(\cup^{b}_{t=1}(A-t))\geq \alpha /\gamma -\epsilon, \] where \(A-t\) is the set \(\{s\in {\mathbb{N}}:\) \(s+t\in A\}\).