The true complexity of a system of linear equations

It is well-known that if a subset A of a finite Abelian group G satisfies a quasirandomness property called uniformity of degree k, then it contains roughly the expected number of arithmetic progressions of length k, that is, the number of progressions one would expect in a random subset of G of the same density as A. One is naturally led to ask which degree of uniformity is required of A in order to control the number of solutions to a general system of linear equations. Using so-called "quadratic Fourier analysis", we show that certain linear systems that were previously thought to require quadratic uniformity are in fact governed by linear uniformity. More generally, we conjecture a necessary and sufficient condition on a linear system L which guarantees that any subset A of F_p^n which is uniform of degree k contains the expected number of solutions to L.Comment: 30 page

What is good mathematics?

Some personal thoughts and opinions on what ``good quality mathematics'' is, and whether one should try to define this term rigorously. As a case study, the story of Szemer\'edi's theorem is presented.Comment: 12 pages, no figures. To appear, Bull. Amer. Math. So

Packing tight Hamilton cycles in 3-uniform hypergraphs

Let H be a 3-uniform hypergraph with N vertices. A tight Hamilton cycle C \subset H is a collection of N edges for which there is an ordering of the vertices v_1, ..., v_N such that every triple of consecutive vertices {v_i, v_{i+1}, v_{i+2}} is an edge of C (indices are considered modulo N). We develop new techniques which enable us to prove that under certain natural pseudo-random conditions, almost all edges of H can be covered by edge-disjoint tight Hamilton cycles, for N divisible by 4. Consequently, we derive the corollary that random 3-uniform hypergraphs can be almost completely packed with tight Hamilton cycles w.h.p., for N divisible by 4 and P not too small. Along the way, we develop a similar result for packing Hamilton cycles in pseudo-random digraphs with even numbers of vertices.Comment: 31 pages, 1 figur

Ramsey numbers of Berge-hypergraphs and related structures

For a graph $G=(V,E)$, a hypergraph $\mathcal{H}$ is called a Berge-$G$, denoted by $BG$, if there exists a bijection $f: E(G) \to E(\mathcal{H})$ such that for every $e \in E(G)$, $e \subseteq f(e)$. Let the Ramsey number $R^r(BG,BG)$ be the smallest integer $n$ such that for any $2$-edge-coloring of a complete $r$-uniform hypergraph on $n$ vertices, there is a monochromatic Berge-$G$ subhypergraph. In this paper, we show that the 2-color Ramsey number of Berge cliques is linear. In particular, we show that $R^3(BK_s, BK_t) = s+t-3$ for $s,t \geq 4$ and $\max(s,t) \geq 5$ where $BK_n$ is a Berge-$K_n$ hypergraph. For higher uniformity, we show that $R^4(BK_t, BK_t) = t+1$ for $t\geq 6$ and $R^k(BK_t, BK_t)=t$ for $k \geq 5$ and $t$ sufficiently large. We also investigate the Ramsey number of trace hypergraphs, suspension hypergraphs and expansion hypergraphs.Comment: Updated to include suggestions of the refere