In this article, we investigate when the set of primitive geodesic lengths on
a Riemannian manifold have arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. We prove
that in the space of negatively curved metrics, a metric having such arithmetic
progressions is quite rare. We introduce almost arithmetic progressions, a
coarsification of arithmetic progressions, and prove that every negatively
curved, closed Riemannian manifold has arbitrarily long almost arithmetic
progressions in its primitive length spectrum. Concerning genuine arithmetic
progressions, we prove that every non-compact, locally symmetric, arithmetic
manifold has arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions in its primitive length
spectrum. We end with a conjectural characterization of arithmeticity in terms
of arithmetic progressions in the primitive length spectrum. We also suggest an
approach to a well known spectral rigidity problem based on the scarcity of
manifolds with arithmetic progressions.Comment: v3: 23 pages. To appear in Publ. Ma
