New Applications of the Polynomial Method to Problems in Combinatorics

Series
School of Mathematics Colloquium
Time
Thursday, October 13, 2016 - 11:05am for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Ernie Croot – Georgia Tech
Organizer
Anton Leykin
In this talk I will discuss some new applications of the polynomial method to some classical problems in combinatorics, in particular the Cap-Set Problem. The Cap-Set Problem is to determine the size of the largest subset A of F_p^n having no three-term arithmetic progressions, which are triples of vectors x,y,z satisfying x+y=2z. I will discuss an analogue of this problem for Z_4^n and the recent progress on it due to myself, Seva Lev and Peter Pach; and will discuss the work of Ellenberg and Gijswijt, and of Tao, on the F_p^n version (the original context of the problem).