New York Number Theory Seminar
November 30, 2000, 5PM
Renling Jin, College of Charleston

Title:
Scrutinizing the Sumset Phenomenon
Subtitle:
The impact of the study of elusive nonstandard integers on the study of finite integers in our real world.
Abstract:
The sumset phenomenon states that if both A and B are large in terms of "measure", then A+B is not small in terms of "order-topology". A well-known example of the phenomenon in real analysis says that if both A and B have positive Lebesgue measure, then A+B contains a non-empty open interval. Note that there exists a nowhere dense set of positive Lebesgue measure. In the talk, I will present two new examples of the sumset phenomenon about the sequences of natural numbers and the sequences of finite subsets of natural numbers. In these cases, I use certain kind of density for "measure" and certain kind of syndeticity for "order-topology". I will also introduce some of my more recent results which indicate that the two examples mentioned above are optimal in some sense. In the talk, I will also explain how we can prove these results using nonstandard analysis in a natural way.