Full dimensional sets without given patterns (Q416429)

This paper is an interesting contribution to the additive geometric measure theory, understood as the search for arithmetic patterns in sufficiently large subsets of \(\mathbb R^n\). Let \(A\) and \(P\) be subsets of \(\mathbb R^n\). One says that \(A\) contains \(P\) as a pattern if there exists a similarity \(\phi: \mathbb R^n\to\mathbb R^n\) such that \(\phi(P)\subset A\). It is easy to see that a set of positive measure contains every finite set as a pattern. On the other hand, for every three-point subset \(P\subset \mathbb R\) there exists a compact set \(A\subset \mathbb R\) of Hausdorff dimension \(1\) which does not contain \(P\) as a pattern [\textit{T. Keleti}, Anal. PDE 1, No. 1, 29--33 (2008; Zbl 1151.28302)]. One of the results of the present article (Theorem 2.8) achieves the same goal in \(\mathbb R^2\): for any three-point subset \(P\subset \mathbb R^2\) there exists a compact set \(A\subset \mathbb R^2\) of Hausdorff dimension \(2\) which does not contain \(P\) as a pattern. In dimensions \(n>2\) the author constructs a compact set of full Hausdorff dimension which does not contain the vertices of any parallelogram (with at least three distinct vertices). Another part of the paper concerns the dimension and density of the divided difference sets. Given \(A\subset \mathbb C\), let \(\mathcal T(A)=\left\{\frac{z-x}{y-x} : x,y,z\in A, x\neq y\right\}\). The author proves several results about \(\mathcal T(A)\), for example (Corollary 3.2): if \(A\subset \mathbb R\) is compact and \(\mathrm{dim}_H(A)=1\), then \(\mathcal T(A)\) is dense in \(\mathbb R\). It remains unknown whether the divided difference set of every compact 2-dimensional subset \(A\subset \mathbb C\) is dense in \(\mathbb C\). There is quite a large gap here, because it is not even known whether there exists a compact set with \(\mathrm{dim}\, A>1\) for which \(\overline{\mathcal T(A)}\neq \mathbb C\). Some of the results of this paper were later put into a larger framework in [\textit{A. Máthé}, ``Sets of large dimension not containing polynomial configurations'', \url{arXiv:1201.0548}].