Sumsets and entropy revisited

Let A and B be two affinely generating sets of (Z_2)^n. As usual, we denote their Minkowski sum by A+B. How small can A+B be, given the cardinalities of A and B? We give a tight answer to this question. Our bound is attained when both A and B are unions of cosets of a certain subgroup of (Z_2)^n. These cosets are arranged as Hamming balls, the smaller of which has radius 1. By similar methods, we re-prove the Freiman-Ruzsa theorem in (Z_2)^n, with an optimal upper bound. De...

Let A be a subset of an abelian group G. We say that A is sum-free if there do not exist x,y and z in A satisfying x + y = z. We determine, for any G, the cardinality of the largest sum-free subset of G. This equals c(G)|G| where c(G) is a constant depending on G and lying in the interval [2/7,1/2]. We also estimate the number of sum-free subsets of G. It turns out that log_2 of this number is c(G)|G| + o(|G|), which is tight up to the o-term. For certain abelian groups, ...

Over the past few years, a family of interesting new inequalities for the entropies of sums and differences of random variables has been developed by Ruzsa, Tao and others, motivated by analogous results in additive combinatorics. The present work extends these earlier results to the case of random variables taking values in $\mathbb{R}^n$ or, more generally, in arbitrary locally compact and Polish abelian groups. We isolate and study a key quantity, the Ruzsa divergence betw...

Given a subset $A$ of the $n$-dimensional Boolean hypercube $\mathbb{F}_2^n$, the sumset $A+A$ is the set $\{a+a': a, a' \in A\}$ where addition is in $\mathbb{F}_2^n$. Sumsets play an important role in additive combinatorics, where they feature in many central results of the field. The main result of this paper is a sublinear-time algorithm for the problem of sumset size estimation. In more detail, our algorithm is given oracle access to (the indicator function of) an arbi...

In the paper we prove that any sumset or difference set has large E_3 energy. Also, we give a full description of families of sets having critical relations between some kind of energies such as E_k, T_k and Gowers norms. In particular, we give criteria for a set to be a 1) set of the form H+L, where H+H is small and L has "random structure", 2) set equals a disjoint union of sets H_j, each H_j has small doubling, 3) set having large subset A' with 2A' is equal to a set with ...

A new notion of partition-determined functions is introduced, and several basic inequalities are developed for the entropy of such functions of independent random variables, as well as for cardinalities of compound sets obtained using these functions. Here a compound set means a set obtained by varying each argument of a function of several variables over a set associated with that argument, where all the sets are subsets of an appropriate algebraic structure so that the func...

We study the extent to which sets A in Z/NZ, N prime, resemble sets of integers from the additive point of view (``up to Freiman isomorphism''). We give a direct proof of a result of Freiman, namely that if |A + A| < K|A| and |A| < c(K)N then A is Freiman isomorphic to a set of integers. Because we avoid appealing to Freiman's structure theorem, we get a reasonable bound: we can take c(K) > exp(-cK^2 log K). As a byproduct of our argument we obtain a sharpening of the secon...

In this paper we start to investigate a new body of questions in additive combinatorics. The fundamental Cauchy--Davenport theorem gives a lower bound on the size of a sumset A+B for subsets of the cyclic group Zp of order p (p prime), and this is just one example of a large family of results. Our aim in this paper is to investigate what happens if we restrict the number of elements of one set that we may use to form the sums. Here is the question we set out to answer: given ...

We prove a new class of low-energy decompositions which, amongst other consequences, imply that any finite set $A$ of integers may be written as $A = B \cup C$, where $B$ and $C$ are disjoint sets satisfying \[ |\{ (b_1, \dots, b_{2s}) \in B^{2s} \ | \ b_1 + \dots + b_{s} = b_{s+1} + \dots + b_{2s}\}| \ll_{s} |B|^{2s - (\log \log s)^{1/2 - o(1)}} \] and \[ |\{ (c_1, \dots, c_{2s}) \in C^{2s} \ | \ c_1 \dots c_{s} = c_{s+1} \dots c_{2s} \}| \ll_{s} |C|^{2s - (\log \log s)^{1/2...

We discuss several questions concerning sum-free sets in groups, raised by Erd\H{o}s in his survey "Extremal problems in number theory" (Proceedings of the Symp. Pure Math. VIII AMS) published in 1965. Among other things, we give a characterization for large sets $A$ in an abelian group $G$ which do not contain a subset $B$ of fixed size $k$ such that the sum of any two different elements of $B$ do not belong to $A$ (in other words, $B$ is sum-free with respect to $A$). Erd...