Exploration on Incidence Geometry and Sum-Product Phenomena

We prove some novel multi-parameter point-line incidence estimates in vector spaces over finite fields. While these could be seen as special cases of higher-dimensional incidence results, they outperform their more general counterparts in those contexts. We go on to present a number of applications to illustrate their use in combinatorial problems from geometry and number theory.

We survey recent (and not so recent) results concerning arrangements of lines, points and other geometric objects and the applications these results have in theoretical computer science and combinatorics. The three main types of problems we will discuss are: (1) Counting incidences: Given a set (or several sets) of geometric objects (lines, points, etc..), what is the maximum number of incidences (or intersections) that can exist between elements in different sets? We will ...

Let $q$ be a power of a prime and $\mathbb{F}_q$ the finite field consisting of $q$ elements. We prove explicit upper bounds on the number of incidences between lines and Cartesian products in $\mathbb{F}_q^2$. We also use our results on point-line incidences to give new sum-product type estimates concerning sums of reciprocals.

In recent years, sum-product estimates in Euclidean space and finite fields have been studied using a variety of combinatorial, number theoretic and analytic methods. Erdos type problems involving the distribution of distances, areas and volumes have also received much attention. In this paper we prove a relatively straightforward function version of an incidence results for points and planes previously established in \cite{HI07} and \cite{HIKR07}. As a consequence of our met...

This thesis establishes new quantitative records in several problems of incidence geometry and growth. After the necessary background in Chapters 1, 2 and 3, the following results are proven. Chapter 4 gives new results in the incidence geometry of a plane determined by a finite field of prime order. These comprise a new upper bound on the total number of incidences determined by finitely many points and lines, and a new estimate for the number of distinct lines determined ...

In our paper, we introduce a new method for estimating incidences via representation theory. We obtain several applications to various sums with multiplicative characters and to Zaremba's conjecture from number theory.

The point-plane incidence theorem states that the number of incidences between $n$ points and $m\geq n$ planes in the projective three-space over a field $F$, is $$O\left(m\sqrt{n}+ m k\right),$$ where $k$ is the maximum number of collinear points, with the extra condition $n< p^2$ if $F$ has characteristic $p>0$. This theorem also underlies a state-of-the-art Szemer\'edi-Trotter type bound for point-line incidences in $F^2$, due to Stevens and de Zeeuw. This review focuses...

In this paper we obtain a new sum-product estimate in prime fields. In particular, we show that if $A\subseteq \mathbb{F}_p$ satisfies $|A|\le p^{64/117}$ then $$ \max\{|A\pm A|, |AA|\} \gtrsim |A|^{39/32}. $$ Our argument builds on and improves some recent results of Shakan and Shkredov which use the eigenvalue method to reduce to estimating a fourth moment energy and the additive energy $E^+(P)$ of some subset $P\subseteq A+A$. Our main novelty comes from reducing the estim...

We prove a point-wise and average bound for the number of incidences between points and hyper-planes in vector spaces over finite fields. While our estimates are, in general, sharp, we observe an improvement for product sets and sets contained in a sphere. We use these incidence bounds to obtain significant improvements on the arithmetic problem of covering ${\mathbb F}_q$, the finite field with q elements, by $A \cdot A+... +A \cdot A$, where A is a subset ${\mathbb F}_q$ of...

We obtain some asymptotic formulae (with power savings in their error terms) for the number of quadruples in the Cartesian product of an arbitrary set $A \subset \mathbf{R}$ and for the number of quintuplets in $A\times A$ for any subset $A$ of the prime field $\mathbf{F}_p$. Also, we obtain some applications of our results to incidence problems in $\mathbf{F}_p$.