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Geometric-progression-free sets over quadratic number fields

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 February 2017

Andrew Best
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Williams College, Williamstown, MA 01267, USA (klh1@williams.edu)
Karen Huan
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Williams College, Williamstown, MA 01267, USA (klh1@williams.edu)
Nathan McNew
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, USA
Steven J. Miller
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Williams College, Williamstown, MA 01267, USA (sjm1@williams.edu; steven.miller.mc.96@aya.yale.edu)
Jasmine Powell
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA
Kimsy Tor
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics, Manhattan College, Riverdale, NY 10471, USA
Madeleine Weinstein
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA 91711, USA (mweinstein@hmc.edu)

Extract

In Ramsey theory one wishes to know how large a collection of objects can be while avoiding a particular substructure. A problem of recent interest has been to study how large subsets of the natural numbers can be while avoiding three-term geometric progressions. Building on recent progress on this problem, we consider the analogous problem over quadratic number fields. We first construct high-density subsets of the algebraic integers of an imaginary quadratic number field that avoid three-term geometric progressions. When unique factorization fails, or over a real quadratic number field, we instead look at subsets of ideals of the ring of integers. Our approach here is to construct sets ‘greedily’, a generalization of the greedy set of rational integers considered by Rankin. We then describe the densities of these sets in terms of values of the Dedekind zeta function. Next, we consider geometric-progression-free sets with large upper density. We generalize an argument by Riddell to obtain upper bounds for the upper density of geometric-progression-free subsets, and construct sets avoiding geometric progressions with high upper density to obtain lower bounds for the supremum of the upper density of all such subsets. Both arguments depend critically on the elements with small norm in the ring of integers.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Society of Edinburgh 2017 

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