Product-free subsets of $(0,1)$

Abstract

The third problem in Ben Green's collection of 100 open problems asks whether an open subset of $(0,1)$ that does not contain $x,y,z$ with $xy=z$ must have measure at most 1/3. We give an affirmative answer to this question. As part of the proof we obtain a result of independent interest that gives a lower bound for the size of the sumset and the difference set of a set of reals in terms not just of its size but also of a parameter that measures how far it is from being an interval.