Extremal Sidon sets are Fourier uniform, with applications to partition regularity

Abstract

Generalising results of Erd\H{o}s-Freud and Lindstr\"om, we prove that the largest Sidon subset of a bounded interval of integers is equidistributed in Bohr neighbourhoods. We establish this by showing that extremal Sidon sets are Fourier-pseudorandom, in that they have no large non-trivial Fourier coefficients. As a further application we deduce that, for any partition regular equation in five or more variables, every finite colouring of an extremal Sidon set has a monochromatic solution.