No label defined (Q4256474)

The author studies the addition of sets of positive integers related to finite sets \(\{1,2,\dots,N\}\), \(N\in\mathbb{N}\) \((=\{1,2, \dots,n, \dots\}) \). If \(A\subseteq \{1,2,\dots, N\}\) has more that \(N/k\) elements then it can be expected that \(\ell A\) (\(2A=A+A\), \(\ell A=A+(\ell-1)A\)) contains a rather long arithmetic progression. The author worked out a theory of addition of finite sets which is analogous to the case of infinite sets. The first section of the paper contains a survey of results concerning this topic, whereas the second one gives new results of the author. Denote by \(|A|\) the cardinality of \(A\), let \(\mathbb{Z}\) denote the set of all integers. If \(N,k\in \mathbb{N}\), \(A\subseteq \mathbb{N}\), then \(E(N,k,A)\) denotes the maximal number of elements of \(kA\) contained in an arithmetic progression of length \(N\), i.e. \[ E(N,k,A)= \max\bigl|\{m+ d, m+2d, \dots, m+Nd\}\cap kA\bigr|. \] Further denote by \(C(k)\) the greatest number such that for all \(N\in\mathbb{N}\), \(A\subseteq\{1,2, \dots,N\}\) and \(|A |\geq 2\) we have \[ E(N,k,A) \geq\left( \min\left( 1,C(k)k{|A|\over N} \right) \right) N, \] and \(C=\inf_{k=2,3, \dots}C(k)\). The author proves among other results: If \(N\geq k+2\) then for \(A=\{1,2,\dots,N\}\) we have \(E(N,k,A)= k+ 2\). For \(N\geq k+2\) we get \[ E(N,k,A)= \left(\min\left(1,{k+2 \over 3k}\cdot k{ |A|\over N}\right) \right)N. \] From this \(C(k)\leq{k+2 \over 3k}\) for each \(k \geq 2\), so that \(C\leq {1\over 3}\). For the entire collection see [Zbl 0919.00044].