Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
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Realizing a fixed pattern. Choose an integer bounding and on . Then every satisfies . Fix and choose an integer such that
By Green and Tao's Theorem 1.1, there are integers , such that is prime for every . Put . For every cell of ,
is one of these primes. The indices lie between and , and distinct cells have distinct indices by the injectivity of . On the dilated cell set , take . We have
Thus L198 applies to and . Multiplication by the nonzero integer preserves the cardinalities of all three projections. L198 therefore gives precisely the required count in a block of consecutive positive integers, where is the largest chosen prime. This proves the first assertion.
The progression minimum. Define exactly as in the claim, using distinct positive common differences. The minimum exists because the attainable cardinalities form a nonempty subset of the positive integers.
For the lower bound, take any primes with largest member and any block of consecutive integers. Since , for every chosen prime there are three consecutive multiples in . The set of counted integers therefore contains progressions with distinct positive differences, so its size is at least .
For the upper bound, let attain . Select exactly of its distinct positive differences , and choose for each. The cells have injective differences. Their three projections are subsets of , so their cardinalities sum to at most . The first assertion realizes this cell set as primes and a block with that sum as its exact count. Consequently
Finally any block of integers contains a subblock of integers. Its count is therefore at least . Combining this with gives . No limit in or uniform bound on the sizes of the realizing primes is needed.