Additive Number Theory

This proceedings volume, the fifth in a series from the Combinatorial and Additive Number Theory (CANT) conferences, is based on talks from the 19th annual workshop, held online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Organized every year since 2003 by the New York Number Theory Seminar at the CUNY Graduate Center, the workshops survey state-of-the-art open problems in combinatorial and additive number theory and related parts of mathematics. The CANT 2021 meeting featured over a hundred speakers from North and South America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand, and was the largest CANT conference in terms of the number of both lectures and participants.

[Hilbert's] style has not the terseness of many of our modem authors in mathematics, which is based on the assumption that printer's labor and paper are costly but the reader's effort and time are not. H. Weyl [143] The purpose of this book is to describe the classical problems in additive number theory and to introduce the circle method and the sieve method, which are the basic analytical and combinatorial tools used to attack these problems. This book is intended for students who want to lel?Ill additive number theory, not for experts who already know it. For this reason, proofs include many "unnecessary" and "obvious" steps; this is by design. The archetypical theorem in additive number theory is due to Lagrange: Every nonnegative integer is the sum of four squares. In general, the set A of nonnegative integers is called an additive basis of order h if every nonnegative integer can be written as the sum of h not necessarily distinct elements of A.

Elementary Methods in Number Theory begins with "a first course in number theory" for students with no previous knowledge of the subject. The main topics are divisibility, prime numbers, and congruences. There is also an introduction to Fourier analysis on finite abelian groups, and a discussion on the abc conjecture and its consequences in elementary number theory. In the second and third parts of the book, deep results in number theory are proved using only elementary methods.