Almost arithmetic progressions in the primes and other large sets

Abstract

A celebrated and deep result of Green and Tao states that the primes contain arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. In this note I provide a straightforward argument demonstrating that the primes get arbitrarily close to arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. The argument also applies to `large sets' in the sense of Erdős-Turán. The proof is short, completely self-contained, and aims to give a heuristic explanation of why the primes, and other large sets, possess arithmetic structure.

Expository article, 6 pages, 1 figure. To appear in The American Mathematical Monthly