Additive Combinatorics (Crm Proceedings and Lecture Notes, 43)

One of the most active areas in mathematics today is the rapidly emerging new topic of "additive combinatorics". Building on Gowers' use of the Freiman-Ruzsa theorem in harmonic analysis (in particular, his proof of Szemerédi's theorem), Green and Tao famously proved that there are arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions of primes, and Bourgain and his co-authors have given non-trivial estimates for hitherto untouchably short exponential sums. There are further important consequences in group theory and in complexity theory and compelling questions in ergodic theory, discrete geometry and many other disciplines. The basis of the subject is not too difficult: it can be best described as the theory of adding together sets of numbers; in particular, understanding the structure of the two original sets if their sum is small. This book brings together key researchers from all of these different areas, sharing their insights in articles meant to inspire mathematicians coming from all sorts of different backgrounds. Titles in this series are co-published with the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques.