Szemer'edi's Regularity Lemma is an important tool in discrete mathematics. It says that, in some sense, all graphs can be approximated by random-looking graphs. Therefore the lemma helps in proving theorems for arbitrary graphs whenever the corresponding result is easy for random graphs. Recently quite a few new results were obtained by using the Regularity Lemma, and also some new variants and generalizations appeared. In this survey we describe some typical applications and some generalizations. Contents Preface 1. Introduction 2. How to apply the Regularity Lemma 3. Early applications 4. Building large subgraphs 5. Embedding trees 6. Bounded degree spanning subgraphs 7. Weakening the Regularity Lemma 8. Strengthening the Regularity Lemma 9. Algorithmic questions 10. Regularity and randomness Preface Szemer'edi's Regularity Lemma [121] is one of the most powerful tools of (extremal) graph theory. It was invented as an auxiliary lemma in the proof of the famous conjectu...

Abstract. Recent work of Gowers [10] and Nagle, Rödl, Schacht, and Skokan [15], [19], [20] has established a hypergraph removal lemma, which in turn implies some results of Szemerédi [26] and Furstenberg-Katznelson [7] concerning one-dimensional and multi-dimensional arithmetic progressions respectively. In this paper we shall give a self-contained proof of this hypergraph removal lemma. In fact we prove a slight strengthening of the result, which we will use in a subsequent paper [29] to establish (among other things) infinitely many constellations of a prescribed shape in the Gaussian primes. 1.

A famous theorem of Szemerédi asserts that given any density 0 < δ ≤ 1 and any integer k ≥ 3, any set of integers with density δ will contain infinitely many proper arithmetic progressions of length k. For general k there are essentially four known proofs of this fact; Szemerédi’s original combinatorial proof using the Szemerédi regularity lemma and van der Waerden’s theorem, Furstenberg’s proof using ergodic theory, Gowers’ proof using Fourier analysis and the inverse theory of additive combinatorics, and Gowers’ more recent proof using a hypergraph regularity lemma. Of these four, the ergodic theory proof is arguably the shortest, but also the least elementary, requiring in particular the use of transfinite induction (and thus the axiom of choice), decomposing a general ergodic system as the weakly mixing extension of a transfinite tower of compact extensions. Here we present a quantitative, self-contained version of this ergodic theory proof, and which is “elementary ” in the sense that it does not require the axiom of choice, the use of infinite sets or measures, or the use of the Fourier transform or inverse theorems from additive combinatorics. It also gives explicit (but extremely poor) quantitative bounds.

This review of some solved and unsolved problems in combinatorial analysis will be highly subjective. i will only discuss problems which I either worked on or at least thought about. The disadvantages of such an approach are obvious, but the disadvantages are perhaps counterbalanced by the fact that I certainly know more about these problems than about others (which perhaps are more important). i will mainly discuss finite combinatorial problems. I cannot claim completeness in any way but will try to refer to the literature in some cases; even so many things will be omitted. ISO will denote the cardinal number of S; c, cl, c2,... will denote absolute constants not necessarily the same at each occurrence. I. I will start with some problems dealing with subsets of a set. Let IS I =n. A well known theorem of Sperner [57] states that if A i a S, 15 i 5 m, is such that no A, contains any other, then max m=(aA). The theorem of Sperner has many applications in number theory; as far as I know these were first noticed by Behrend [2] and myself [8]. I asked 30 years ago several further extremal problems about subsets which also have number theoretic consequences. Let At a S, 15 i 5mi, assume that there are no three distinct A's so that Ai V A! = A,. I conjectured that

Abstract. A long-standing and almost folkloric conjecture is that the primes contain arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. Until recently, the only progress on this conjecture was due to van der Corput, who showed in 1939 that there are infinitely many triples of primes in arithmetic progression. In an amazing fusion of methods from analytic number theory and ergodic theory, Ben Green and Terence Tao showed that for any positive integer k, there exist infinitely many arithmetic progressions of length k consisting only of prime numbers. This is an introduction to some of the ideas in the proof, concentrating on the connections to ergodic theory. 1. Background For hundreds of years, mathematicians have made conjectures about patterns in the primes: one of the simplest to state is that the primes contain arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. It is not clear exactly when this conjecture was first formalized, but as early as 1770 Lagrange and Waring studied the problem of how large the common difference of an arithmetic progression of k primes must be. A

An abstract, Hales-Jewett type extension of the polynomial van der Waerden Theorem [BL] is established: Theorem. Let r,d,q ∈ N. There exists N ∈ N such that for any r-coloring of the set of subsets of V = {1,...,N} d × {1,...,q} there exist a set a ⊂ V and a nonempty set γ ⊆ {1,...,N} such that a ∩ (γ d × {1,...,q}) = ∅, and the subsets a, a ∪ (γ d × {1}), a ∪ (γ d × {2}),..., a ∪ (γ d × {q}) are all of the same color. This “polynomial ” Hales-Jewett theorem contains refinements of many combinatorial facts as special cases. The proof is achieved by introducing and developing the apparatus of set-polynomials (polynomials whose coefficients are finite sets) and applying the methods of topological dynamics. 0.1. The celebrated van der Waerden Theorem ([W]) states that if the

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The Hales–Jewett theorem asserts that for every r and every k there exists n such that every r-colouring of the n-dimensional grid {1,..., k} n contains a combinatorial line. This result is a generalization of van der Waerden’s theorem, and it is one of the fundamental results of Ramsey theory. The theorem of van der Waerden has a famous density version, conjectured by Erdős and Turán in 1936, proved by Szemerédi in 1975 and given a different proof by Furstenberg in 1977. The Hales–Jewett theorem has a density version as well, proved by Furstenberg and Katznelson in 1991 by means of a significant extension of the ergodic techniques that had been pioneered by Furstenberg in his proof of Szemerédi’s theorem. In this paper, we give the first elementary proof of the theorem of Furstenberg and Katznelson, and the first to provide a quantitative bound on how large n needs to be. In particular, we show that a subset of [3] n of density δ contains a combinatorial line if n ≥ 2 ⇈ O(1/δ 3). Our proof is surprisingly simple: indeed, it gives what is probably the simplest known proof of Szemerédi’s theorem.

Recently Bergelson and Leibman proved an extension to van der Waerden’s theorem involving polynomials. They also generalised the Hales–Jewett theorem in a similar way. The paper presents short and purely combinatorial proofs of those results. 1.

Abstract. A famous theorem of Szemerédi asserts that any set of integers of positive upper density will contain arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. In its full generality, we know of four types of arguments that can prove this theorem: the original combinatorial (and graph-theoretical) approach of Szemerédi, the ergodic theory approach of Furstenberg, the Fourier-analytic approach of Gowers, and the hypergraph approach of Nagle-Rödl-Schacht-Skokan and Gowers. In this lecture series we introduce the first, second and fourth approaches, though we will not delve into the full details of any of them. One of the themes of these lectures is the strong similarity of ideas between these approaches, despite the fact that they initially seem rather different. 1.