Arithmetic progressions and the primes - El Escorial lectures

This is an article for a general mathematical audience on the author's work, joint with Terence Tao, establishing that there are arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions of primes. It is based on several one hour lectures, chiefly given at British universities.

B. Green and T. Tao have recently proved that 'the set of primes contains arbitrary long arithmetic progressions', answering to an old question with a remarkably simple formulation. The proof does not use any "transcendental" method and any of the deep theorems of analytic number theory. It is written in a 'spirit' close to ergodic theory and in particular of Furstenberg's proof of Szemer\'{e}di's Theorem, but it does not use any result of this theory. Therefore the method ca...

A celebrated and deep result of Green and Tao states that the primes contain arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. In this note I provide a straightforward argument demonstrating that the primes get arbitrarily close to arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. The argument also applies to `large sets' in the sense of Erd\H{o}s-Tur\'an. The proof is short, completely self-contained, and aims to give a heuristic explanation of why the primes, and other large sets, possess ...

In this expository article, we describe the recent approach, motivated by ergodic theory, towards detecting arithmetic patterns in the primes, and in particular establishing that the primes contain arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. One of the driving philosophies is to identify precisely what the obstructions could be that prevent the primes (or any other set) from behaving ``randomly'', and then either show that the obstructions do not actually occur, or else convert...

We prove a generalization of the author's work to show that any subset of the primes which is `well-distributed' in arithmetic progressions contains many primes which are close together. Moreover, our bounds hold with some uniformity in the parameters. As applications, we show there are infinitely many intervals of length $(\log{x})^{\epsilon}$ containing $\gg_\epsilon \log\log{x}$ primes, and show lower bounds of the correct order of magnitude for the number of strings of $m...

We prove that there are arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions of primes. There are three major ingredients. The first is Szemeredi's theorem, which asserts that any subset of the integers of positive density contains progressions of arbitrary length. The second, which is the main new ingredient of this paper, is a certain transference principle. This allows us to deduce from Szemeredi's theorem that any subset of a sufficiently pseudorandom set of positive relative densi...

We prove that for a positive integer $k$ the primes in certain kinds of intervals can not distribute too 'uniformly' among the reduced residue classes modulo $k$. Hereby, we prove a generalization of a conjecture of Recaman and establish our results in a much more general situation, in particular for prime ideals in number fields.

In the present work the existence of some patterns of primes is shown which generalize the celebrated result of Green and Tao according to which there are arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions in the sequence of primes

Additive combinatorics is built around the famous theorem by Szemer\'edi which asserts existence of arithmetic progressions of any length among the integers. There exist several different proofs of the theorem based on very different techniques. Szemer\'edi's theorem is an existence statement, whereas the ultimate goal in combinatorics is always to make enumeration statements. In this article we develop new methods based on real algebraic geometry to obtain several quantitati...

The celebrated Green-Tao theorem states that the prime numbers contain arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. We give an exposition of the proof, incorporating several simplifications that have been discovered since the original paper.