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.

Abstract. We establish the existence of infinitely many 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 ≤ x ε such that x+P1(m),..., x+Pk(m) are simultaneously prime. The arguments are based on those in [18], 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. Contents

Abstract. We introduce a correspondence principle (analogous to the Furstenberg correspondence principle) that allows one to extract an infinite random graph or hypergraph from a sequence of increasingly large deterministic graphs or hypergraphs. As an application we present a new (infinitary) proof of the hypergraph removal lemma of Nagle-Schacht-Rödl-Skokan and Gowers, which does not require the hypergraph regularity lemma and requires significantly less computation. This in turn gives new proofs of several corollaries of the hypergraph removal lemma, such as Szemerédi’s theorem on arithmetic progressions. 1.

Abstract. A famous theorem of Szemerédi asserts that all subsets of the integers with positive upper density will contain arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. There are many different proofs of this deep theorem, but they are all based on a fundamental dichotomy between structure and randomness, which in turn leads (roughly speaking) to a decomposition of any object into a structured (low-complexity) component and a random (discorrelated) component. Important examples of these types of decompositions include the Furstenberg structure theorem and the Szemerédi regularity lemma. One recent application of this dichotomy is the result of Green and Tao establishing that the prime numbers contain arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions (despite having density zero in the integers). The power of this dichotomy is evidenced by the fact that the Green-Tao theorem requires surprisingly little technology from analytic number theory, relying instead almost exclusively on manifestations of this dichotomy such as Szemerédi’s theorem. In this paper we survey various manifestations of this dichotomy in combinatorics, harmonic analysis, ergodic theory, and number theory. As we hope to emphasize here, the underlying themes in these arguments are remarkably similar even though the contexts are radically different. 1.

Abstract. Szemerédi’s regularity lemma is a basic tool in graph theory, and also plays an important role in additive combinatorics, most notably in proving Szemerédi’s theorem on arithmetic progressions [19], [18]. In this note we revisit this lemma from the perspective of probability theory and information theory instead of graph theory, and observe a slightly stronger variant of this lemma, related to similar strengthenings of that lemma in [1]. This stronger version of the regularity lemma was extended in [21] to reprove the analogous regularity lemma for hypergraphs. 1.

Let T1,..., Tl: X → X be commuting measure-preserving transformations on a probability space (X, X, µ). We show that the multiple ergodic averages 1 PN−1 N n=0 f1(T n 1 x)... fl(T n l x) are convergent in L2 (X, X, µ) as N → ∞ for all f1,..., fl ∈ L ∞ (X, X, µ); this was previously established for l = 2 by Conze and Lesigne [2] and for general l assuming some additional ergodicity hypotheses on the maps Ti and TiT −1 j by Frantzikinakis and Kra [3] (with the l = 3 case of this result established earlier in [29]). Our approach is combinatorial and finitary in nature, inspired by recent developments regarding the hypergraph regularity and removal lemmas, although we will not need the full strength of those lemmas. In particular, the l = 2 case of our arguments are a finitary analogue of those in [2].

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.

Abstract. In this expository article, we describe the recent approach, motivated by ergodic theory, towards detecting arithmetic patterns in the primes, and in particular establishing in [26] that the primes contain arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. One of the driving philosophies is to identify precisely what the obstructions could be that prevent the primes (or any other set) from behaving “randomly”, and then either show that the obstructions do not actually occur, or else convert the obstructions into usable structural information on the primes. 1.

Szemerédi’s regularity lemma asserts that every graph can be decomposed into relatively few random-like subgraphs. This random-like behavior enables one to find and enumerate subgraphs of a given isomorphism type, yielding the so-called counting lemma for graphs. The combined application of these two lemmas is known as the regularity method for graphs and has proved useful in graph theory, combinatorial geometry, combinatorial number theory and theoretical computer science. Recently, the graph regularity method was extended to hypergraphs by Gowers and by Skokan and the authors. The hypergraph regularity method has been successfully employed in a handful of combinatorial applications, including alternative proofs to well-known density theorems of Szemerédi and of Furstenberg and Katznelson. In this paper, we apply the hypergraph regularity method to a few extremal hypergraph problems of Ramsey and Turán flavor.