Compactness and contradiction.
Terence Tao

American Mathematical Society

Publication Year: 2013
ISBN-10: 0-8218-9492-7
ISBN-13: 978-0-8218-9492-7

Last updated: Sep 1, 2023

This continues my series of books derived from my blog. The preceding books in this series were “Structure and Randomness“, “Poincaré’s legacies“, “An epsilon of room“, “An introduction to measure theory“, “Topics in random matrix theory“, and “Higher order Fourier analysis“.

A draft version of the MS can be found here.

Pre-errata (corrected in the published version):

  • Page 78: In the first paragraph, “at least the” should be “at least one of the”.  In the second paragraph, “generated by S_k” and “generated by e_1,\ldots,e_{m-1}” should be “generated by S_k, e_m” and “generated by S_k” respectively. In the third paragraph, after the first sentence, add “We may take N to be a normal subgroup of \hbox{ker}(\phi)“.  In the last paragraph, replace “cannot grow polynomially” by “cannot grow exponentially (as otherwise the number of subsums of A^n e_i for i=1,\ldots,d and n=1,\ldots,N would grow exponentially in N, contradicting the polynomial growth hypothesis)”
  • Page 79, footnote 12: replace the first sentence by “Proof: the algebraic integers \alpha^n for natural number n have bounded degree and all Galois conjugates bounded, so the minimal polynomials have bounded integer coefficients and must thus repeat themselves after finitely many n.”

Errata:

  • Page ???: In Section 1.3, “Wittingstein” should be “Wittgenstein”.
  • Page 82: The first a in “dips below a on a” should be in math mode.
  • Page 92: In the third display, \eta(1/N) should be \frac{1}{2} \eta(1/N).
  • Page 94: “quarternionic” should be “quaternionic” (two occurrences).
  • Page ???: In the paragraph before (3.17), (3.13) should be (3.12).
  • Page 110: “considing” should be “considering”.
  • Page ???: After equation (3.24), c_{\eta,s} N^s should be c_{\eta,s} N^{s+1}.  Also, all occurrences of c_{\eta,s} in this section should be C_{\eta,s} for consistency.
  • Page 131:  in Section 3.10.2, at the end of the treatment of the non-transverse case, “the exponent of K' here is positive” should be “the exponent of K' here is negative”.
  • Page 140: In Theorem 4.3.5, “there exists s” should be “there exists R“.  In the definition of the shift T and the set V_i, x_n, x_{n-1}, x_0 should be c_n, c_{n-1}, c_0 respectively.
  • Page 143: The à in Arzelà-Ascoli is missing.
  • Page 220?:  In Section 5.4.1, all occurrences of T_M A should be T_A M.
  • Page 240: A, H should be in math mode in “determine how likely A would have occurred… under hypothesis H”.  The second display should have \geq rather than >=.  Just before and in the last display, the P(A_i) should have P in bold face.  “infinity” should be \infty.
  • Page 242: after display: “bfP(B|A)” should be “{\bf P}(B|A).

Thanks to Clément Caubel, Doron Lessure, Benjamin Sprung, Felix Voigtlaender, Bill Zajc, and an anonymous contributor for corrections.