3 Probabilistic Tools
All probability spaces in this course will be finite.
Theorem 3.1 (Khintchine’s inequality).
Assuming that:
Then
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Proof.
By nesting of norms, it suffices to prove the case
for some .
Write ,
and assume .
Note that in fact ,
hence .
By Chernoff’s inequality (Example 2.5), for all
we have
and so using the fact that
we have
We shall show by induction on
that . Indeed,
when ,
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For ,
integrate by parts to find that
Corollary 3.2 (Rudin’s Inequality).
Let
be a linearly independent set and let .
Then for any ,
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Corollary 3.3.
Let be a
linearly independent set and let .
Then for all ,
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Proof.
Let
and write .
Then
which is bounded above by
where ,
using Hölder’s inequality.
By Rudin’s Inequality,
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Recall that given
of density ,
we had 𝟙.
This is best possible as the example of a subspace shows. However, in this case the large spectrum is highly
structured.
Theorem 3.4 (Special case of Chang’s Theorem).
Assuming that:
Then there exists
of dimension
such that
𝟙.
Proof.
Let 𝟙 be a maximal
linearly independent set. Let 𝟙.
Clearly . By
Corollary 3.3, for all ,
𝟙𝟙𝟙 |
so
Set
to get .
□
Definition 3.5 (Dissociated).
Let
be a finite abelian group. We say
is dissociated if
for ,
then .
Clearly, if ,
then is
dissociated if and only if it is linearly independent.
Theorem 3.6 (Chang’s Theorem).
Assuming that:
-
a finite abelian group
-
be of density
-
Then .
We may bootstrap Khintchine’s inequality to obtain the following:
Theorem 3.7 (Marcinkiewicz-Zygmund).
Assuming that:
Then
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Proof.
First assume the distribution of the ’s
is symmetric, i.e. for
all . Partition the
probability space
into sets , write
for the induced
measure on
such that all ’s
are symmetric and take at most 2 values. By Khintchine’s inequality, for each
,
so summing over all and taking
-th roots gives the symmetric
case. Now suppose the ’s
are arbitrary, and let
be such that and
are all independent. Applying
the symmetric case to ,
But then
concluding the proof. □
Theorem 3.8 (Croot-Sisask almost periodicity).
Assuming that:
Then there exists
and a set
such that
and
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where for all
, and as a reminder,
is the characteristic
measure of .
Proof.
The main idea is to approximate
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by ,
where
are sampled independently and uniformly from ,
and
is to be chosen later.
For each , define
. For each
, these are independent
random variables with mean ,
so by Marcinkiewicz-Zygmund,
By Hölder with ,
we get
so
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Summing over all ,
we have
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with
by Young / Hölder (
where ).
So we have
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Choose so that the
RHS is at most .
whence
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Write
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By Markov inequality, since
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we have
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so . Let
Now ,
whence
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By Lemma 1.17,
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so there are at least
pairs such that
. In particular,
there exists
and of size
such that for
all , there
exists such
that for all ,
. But then
for each , by
the triangle inequality,
by definion of .
□
Theorem 3.9 (Bogolyubov again, after Sanders).
Assuming that:
Then there exists a subspace
of codimension
such tht
.
Almost periodicity is also a key ingredient in recent work of Kelley and Meka, showing that any
containing no non-trivial 3 term arithmetic progressions has size
.