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Source. Theorem 2, p. 2, of Ben Green, The Cameron-Erdős conjecture, Bull. London Math. Soc. 36 (2004), no. 6, 769--778, cited from the arXiv manuscript math/0304058v1 (4 April 2003) whose pages the labels below follow, as identified on the source card.
Statement
A set of integers is sum-free when there are no with ( allowed). Write and for the collection of sum-free subsets of (p. 1).
Theorem 2 (p. 2). "The number of sum-free subsets of is asymptotically , where takes two different constant values according as is odd or even." (quoted)
That is, there are constants and , with , such that as , where is for odd and for even . The paper does not give the values of the two constants. In particular , which is Conjecture 1 of Cameron and Erdős (p. 1), the form stated in the abstract.
Proof pointer
Section 2 (p. 2) outlines the strategy and Sections 3 and 4 (pp. 2--11) carry it out. Proposition 6 (p. 7) covers every sum-free subset of by one of sets with additive triples; a structure theorem for large sets with few additive triples (Proposition 7, p. 8) then gives Corollary 13 (p. 10): all but sum-free subsets of consist of odd numbers or lie in . The final step (p. 11) is not proved in this paper: it combines Corollary 13 with the count, due to Cameron and Erdős (their 1990 paper, the paper's reference [4]), of the sum-free subsets of as asymptotically . On the way, Proposition 12 (p. 10) rederives from Propositions 6 and 7 the earlier bound of Alon, Calkin, and Erdős and Granville (display (1), p. 1).
Dependencies
Proposition 6, Corollary 13 and the Cameron-Erdős count of sum-free subsets of the top interval, which the paper cites and does not prove. Read depth: claims checked; the statement was read on p. 2 and the closing argument on p. 11; the proofs of Sections 3 and 4 were read for their structure only.
Bears on
- Problem 748: the theorem gives for the problem's count of sum-free subsets of , the bound named on the problem page as the Cameron-Erdős conjecture, and with the lower bound from the subsets of the asked exponent form . The exponent form alone is the older bound the paper attributes to Alon, Calkin, and Erdős and Granville.
- Problem 877: background only. The theorem counts all sum-free subsets, not the maximal ones the problem counts; it shows that the problem's question is the same as asking that maximal sum-free subsets be a vanishing proportion of all sum-free subsets, and it gives no bound on beyond the trivial .