Pontiveros's conjecture on dense sets with incomplete sums of dilates

Let pp be a prime, let kk be a positive integer, and let λ1,,λk\lambda_1,\dots,\lambda_k be nonzero integers viewed in Fp\mathbb{F}_p. For a set AFpA\subseteq\mathbb{F}_p, write λA={λa:aA}\lambda A=\{\lambda a:a\in A\} and let ε>0\varepsilon>0. Pontiveros's conjecture. There exists δ=δ(λ,ε)>0\delta=\delta(\lambda,\varepsilon)>0 such that, for every sufficiently large prime pp, there is a set AFpA\subseteq\mathbb{F}_p satisfying

A>(1/kε)p|A|>(1/k-\varepsilon)p

and

λ1A++λkA(1δ)p.|\lambda_1A+\dots+\lambda_kA|\leqslant(1-\delta)p.

The statement is refuted: the paper explicitly notes that its main theorem disproves it for k=3k=3 and (λ1,λ2,λ3)=(1,1,2)(\lambda_1,\lambda_2,\lambda_3)=(1,1,-2), and gives a further explicit counterexample with six pairwise distinct coefficients.

Sources & referencesView supporting material

Primary source

Vsevolod Lev, Máté Matolcsi, Péter Pál Pach and Dániel Varga, “On the density of Kravitz sets”, arXiv:2510.16522 (2025).

Progress summary

Never refreshed

Nothing recorded yet. Refresh searches the literature and the public web for attempts on this problem, and writes the first summary here.

Solutions 0

No solutions have been posted yet.