On the structures of subset sums in higher dimension

We discuss a structural approach to subset-sum problems in additive combinatorics. The core of this approach are Freiman-type structural theorems, many of which will be presented through the paper. These results have applications in various areas, such as number theory, combinatorics and mathematical physics.

We show that for every positive integer $k$ there are positive constants $C$ and $c$ such that if $A$ is a subset of $\{1, 2, \dots, n\}$ of size at least $C n^{1/k}$, then, for some $d \leq k-1$, the set of subset sums of $A$ contains a homogeneous $d$-dimensional generalized arithmetic progression of size at least $c|A|^{d+1}$. This strengthens a result of Szemer\'edi and Vu, who proved a similar statement without the homogeneity condition. As an application, we make progre...

We analyze sumsets A+B = {a+b : a in A, b in B} where A,B are sets of integers, A is infinite, and B has positive upper Banach density. For each k, we show that A+B contains at least the expected density of k-term arithmetic progressions based on the density of B, in contrast with an example of Bergelson, Host, Kra, and Ruzsa. Furthermore, we show that A+B must contain finite configurations not necessarily found in arbitrary sets of positive density, in contrast with results ...

A set $A\subseteq\mathbb N$ is called $complete$ if every sufficiently large integer can be written as the sum of distinct elements of $A$. In this paper we present a new method for proving the completeness of a set, improving results of Cassels ('60), Zannier ('92), Burr, Erd\H{o}s, Graham, and Li ('96), and Hegyv\'ari ('00). We also introduce the somewhat philosophically related notion of a $dispersing$ set and refine a theorem of Furstenberg ('67).

We study extremal problems about sets of integers that do not contain sumsets with summands of prescribed size. We analyse both finite sets and infinite sequences. We also study the connections of these problems with extremal problems of graphs and hypergraphs.

Let $\mathcal{A}$ be a sequence of $rk$ terms which is made up of $k$ distinct integers each appearing exactly $r$ times in $\mathcal{A}$. The sum of all terms of a subsequence of $\mathcal{A}$ is called a subsequence sum of $\mathcal{A}$. For a nonnegative integer $\alpha \leq rk$, let $\Sigma_{\alpha} (\mathcal{A})$ be the set of all subsequence sums of $\mathcal{A}$ that correspond to the subsequences of length $\alpha$ or more. When $r=1$, we call the subsequence sums as ...

For a nonempty finite set $A$ of integers, let $S(A) = \left\{ \sum_{b\in B} b: \emptyset \not= B\subseteq A\right\}$ be the set of all nonempty subset sums of $A$. In 1995, Nathanson determined the minimum cardinality of $S(A)$ in terms of $|A|$ and described the structure of $A$ for which $|S(A)|$ is the minimum. He asked to characterize the underlying set $A$ if $|S(A)|$ is a small increment to its minimum size. Problems of such nature are inspired by the well-known Freima...

A set of positive integers $A \subset \mathbb{Z}_{> 0}$ is \emph{log-sparse} if there is an absolute constant $C$ so that for any positive integer $x$ the sequence contains at most $C$ elements in the interval $[x,2x)$. In this note we study arithmetic progressions in sums of log-sparse subsets of $\mathbb{Z}_{> 0}$. We prove that for any log-sparse subsets $S_1, \dots, S_n$ of $\mathbb{Z}_{> 0},$ the sumset $S = S_1 + \cdots + S_n$ cannot contain an arithmetic progression of...

Let $h\geq 2$ be a positive integer. For any subset $\mathcal{A}\subset \mathbb{Z}_n$, let $h^{\wedge}\mathcal{A}$ be the set of the elements of $\mathbb{Z}_n$ which are sums of $h$ distinct elements of $\mathcal{A}$. In this paper, we obtain some new results on $4^{\wedge}\mathcal{A}$ and $5^{\wedge}\mathcal{A}$. For example, we show that if $|\mathcal{A}|\geq 0.4045n$ and $n$ is odd, then $4^{\wedge}\mathcal{A}=\mathbb{Z}_{n}$; Under some conditions, if $n$ is even and $|...

A conjecture of Freiman gives an exact formula for the largest volume of a finite set $A$ of integers with given cardinality $k = |A|$ and doubling $T = |2A|$. The formula is known to hold when $T \le 3k-4$, for some small range over $3k-4$ and for families of structured sets called chains. In this paper we extend the formula to sets of every dimension and prove it for sets composed of three segments, giving structural results for the extremal case. A weaker extension to sets...