Ben Green, and I have just uploaded to the arXiv a short (six-page) paper “Yet another proof of Szemeredi’s theorem“, submitted to the 70th birthday conference proceedings for Endre Szemerédi. In this paper we put in print a folklore observation, namely that the inverse conjecture for the Gowers norm, together with the density increment argument, easily implies Szemerédi’s famous theorem on arithmetic progressions. This is unsurprising, given that Gowers’ proof of Szemerédi’s theorem proceeds through a weaker version of the inverse conjecture and a density increment argument, and also given that it is possible to derive Szemerédi’s theorem from knowledge of the characteristic factor for multiple recurrence (the ergodic theory analogue of the inverse conjecture, first established by Host and Kra), as was done by Bergelson, Leibman, and Lesigne (and also implicitly in the earlier paper of Bergelson, Host, and Kra); but to our knowledge the exact derivation of Szemerédi’s theorem from the inverse conjecture was not in the literature. Ordinarily this type of folklore might be considered too trifling (and too well known among experts in the field) to publish; but we felt that the venue of the Szemerédi birthday conference provided a natural venue for this particular observation.

The key point is that one can show (by an elementary argument relying primarily an induction on dimension argument and the Weyl recurrence theorem, i.e. that given any real ${\alpha}$ and any integer ${s \geq 1}$, that the expression ${\alpha n^s}$ gets arbitrarily close to an integer) that given a (polynomial) nilsequence ${n \mapsto F(g(n)\Gamma)}$, one can subdivide any long arithmetic progression (such as ${[N] = \{1,\ldots,N\}}$) into a number of medium-sized progressions, where the nilsequence is nearly constant on each progression. As a consequence of this and the inverse conjecture for the Gowers norm, if a set has no arithmetic progressions, then it must have an elevated density on a subprogression; iterating this observation as per the usual density-increment argument as introduced long ago by Roth, one obtains the claim. (This is very close to the scheme of Gowers’ proof.)

Technically, one might call this the shortest proof of Szemerédi’s theorem in the literature (and would be something like the sixteenth such genuinely distinct proof, by our count), but that would be cheating quite a bit, primarily due to the fact that it assumes the inverse conjecture for the Gowers norm, our current proof of which is checking in at about 100 pages…