On Permutations Avoiding Short Progressions

Abstract

We improve the lower bound on the number of permutations of {1,2,...,n} in which no 3-term arithmetic progression occurs as a subsequence, and derive lower bounds on the upper and lower densities of subsets of the positive integers that can be permuted to avoid 3-term and 4-term APs. We also show that any permutation of the positive integers must contain a 3-term AP with odd common difference as a subsequence, and construct a permutation of the positive integers that does not contain any 4-term AP with odd common difference.