Erdős conjecture on arithmetic progressions


Erdős' conjecture on arithmetic progressions, often referred to as the Erdős–Turán conjecture, is a conjecture in arithmetic combinatorics. It states that if the sum of the reciprocals of the members of a set A of positive integers diverges, then A contains arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions.
Formally, the conjecture states that if A is a large set in the sense that
then A contains arithmetic progressions of any given length, meaning subsets of the form for arbitrarily large k.

History

In 1936, Erdős and Turán made the weaker conjecture that any set of integers with positive natural density contains infinitely many 3 term arithmetic progressions. This was proven by Klaus Roth in 1952, and generalized to arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions by Szemerédi in 1975 in what is now known as Szemerédi's theorem.
In a 1976 talk titled "To the memory of my lifelong friend and collaborator Paul Turán," Paul Erdős offered a prize of US$3000 for a proof of this conjecture. As of 2008 the problem is worth US$5000.

Progress and related results

Erdős' conjecture on arithmetic progressions can be viewed as a stronger version of Szemerédi's theorem. Because the sum of the reciprocals of the primes diverges, the Green-Tao theorem on arithmetic progressions is a special case of the conjecture.
The weaker claim that A must contain infinitely many arithmetic progressions of length 3 is a consequence of an improved bound in Roth's theorem, which appears as the main result in a 2020 preprint by Bloom and Sisask. The former strongest bound in Roth's theorem is due to Bloom.