Additive number theory

Additive number theory is the subfield of number theory concerning the study of subsets of integers and their behavior under addition. More abstractly, the field of additive number theory includes the study of abelian groups and commutative semigroups with an operation of addition. Additive number theory has close ties to combinatorial number theory and the geometry of numbers. Two principal objects of study are the sumset of two subsets A and B of elements from an abelian group G, and the h-fold sumset of A, The field is principally devoted to consideration of direct problems over (typically) the integers, that is, determining the structure of hA from the structure of A: for example, determining which elements can be represented as a sum from hA, where A is a fixed subset. Two classical problems of this type are the Goldbach conjecture (which is the conjecture that 2P contains all even numbers greater than two, where P is the set of primes) and Waring's problem (which asks how large must h be to guarantee that hAk contains all positive integers, where is the set of k-th powers). Many of these problems are studied using the tools from the Hardy-Littlewood circle method and from sieve methods. For example, Vinogradov proved that every sufficiently large odd number is the sum of three primes, and so every sufficiently large even integer is the sum of four primes. Hilbert proved that, for every integer k > 1, every non-negative integer is the sum of a bounded number of k-th powers. In general, a set A of nonnegative integers is called a basis of order h if hA contains all positive integers, and it is called an asymptotic basis if hA contains all sufficiently large integers. Much current research in this area concerns properties of general asymptotic bases of finite order. For example, a set A is called a minimal asymptotic basis of order h if A is an asymptotic basis of order h but no proper subset of A is an asymptotic basis of order h.