New York Number Theory Seminar
April 03, 2003, 3:30 PM in Room 5417
- Speaker:
- David Moulton, Center for Communications Research, Princeton
- Title:
- Representing powers of numbers as subset sums of small sets
- Abstract:
- At the 1997 West Coast Number Theory Conference at Asilomar, Gerry
Myerson asked the following question: Is there a set $B$ of $n$
numbers, such that each power of $2$ from $1$ to $2^n$ is the sum of
the elements of some subset of $B$? We give the surprising answer to
this question and discuss the general problem of how large a set must
be for its subset sums to include some set of powers powers of a
particular integer.