Large subsets of Euclidean space avoiding infinite arithmetic progressions

Abstract

It is known that if a subset of $\mathbb{R}$ has positive Lebesgue measure, then it contains arbitrarily long finite arithmetic progressions. We prove that this result does not extend to infinite arithmetic progressions in the following sense: for each $\lambda$ in $[0,1)$, we construct a subset of $\mathbb{R}$ that intersects every interval of unit length in a set of measure at least $\lambda$, but that does not contain any infinite arithmetic progression.

Final version to appear in Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society