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The primes contain arbitrarily long polynomial progressions.


Terence Tao and Tamar Ziegler. The primes contain arbitrarily long polynomial progressions.


Abstract

We establish the existence of infinitely many \emph{polynomial} progressions in the primes; more precisely, given any integer-valued polynomials P1,..., Pk ∈ Z[m] in one unknown m with P1(0) = ... = Pk(0) = 0 and any ε > 0, we show that there are infinitely many integers x,m with 1 ≤ m ≤ xε such that x+P1(m), ..., x+Pk(m) are simultaneously prime. The arguments are based on those in Green and Tao, which treated the linear case Pi = (i-1)m and ε=1; the main new features are a localization of the shift parameters (and the attendant Gowers norm objects) to both coarse and fine scales, the use of PET induction to linearize the polynomial averaging, and some elementary estimates for the number of points over finite fields in certain algebraic varieties.


Blog links:
Dense Subsets of Pseudorandom Sets: The Paper(s) « In Theory [In Theory@lucatrevisan.wordpress.com/2008]
The "Complexity Theory" Proof of a Theorem of Green-Tao-Ziegler « In Theory [In Theory@lucatrevisan.wordpress.com/2008]
Dense Subsets of Pseudorandom Sets « In Theory [In Theory@lucatrevisan.wordpress.com/2007]