A quantitative ergodic theory proof of Szemerédi's theorem

zbMATH Open1127.11011arXivmath/0405251MaRDI QIDQ870018FDOQ870018

Terence Tao

Publication date: 12 March 2007

Published in: The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: A famous theorem of Szemer'edi asserts that given any density $0<deltaleq1$ and any integer $kgeq3$, any set of integers with density $delta$ will contain infinitely many proper arithmetic progressions of length $k$. For general $k$ there are essentially four known proofs of this fact; Szemer'edi's original combinatorial proof using the Szemer'edi regularity lemma and van der Waerden's theorem, Furstenberg's proof using ergodic theory, Gowers' proof using Fourier analysis and the inverse theory of additive combinatorics, and Gowers' more recent proof using a hypergraph regularity lemma. Of these four, the ergodic theory proof is arguably the shortest, but also the least elementary, requiring in particular the use of transfinite induction (and thus the axiom of choice), decomposing a general ergodic system as the weakly mixing extension of a transfinite tower of compact extensions. Here we present a quantitative, self-contained version of this ergodic theory proof, and which is ``elementary in the sense that it does not require the axiom of choice, the use of infinite sets or measures, or the use of the Fourier transform or inverse theorems from additive combinatorics. It also gives explicit (but extremely poor) quantitative bounds.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0405251

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zbMATH Keywords

almost periodic functionsFourier analysisinverse theoryvan der Corput lemmavan der Waerden theoremGowers normshypergraph regularity lemmaergodig theoryFurstenberg ergodic proofgeneralized von Neumann theoremGowers proofGowers uniform functionsuniformity normsSzemerédi theorem

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Structural characterization of families of graphs (05C75) Notions of recurrence and recurrent behavior in topological dynamical systems (37B20) Arithmetic progressions (11B25)

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