Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

In this work (joint with Derrick Hart), we show that there exists a constant c > 0 such that the following holds for all n sufficiently large: if S is a set of n monic polynomials over C[x], and the product set S.S = {fg : f,g in S}; has size at most n^(1+c), then the sumset S+S = {f+g : f,g in S}; has size \Omega(n^2). There is a related result due to Mei-Chu Chang, which says that if S is a set of n complex numbers, and |S.S| < n^(1+c), then |S+S| > n^(2-f(c)), where f(c) -> 0 as c -> 0; but, there currently is no result (other than the one due to myself and Hart) giving a lower bound of the quality >> n^2 for |S+S| for a fixed value of c. Our proof combines combinatorial and algebraic methods.