Let G be an additive finite abelian group. For every positive integer ℓ, let $dis{c}_{\ell }\left(G\right)$ be the smallest positive integer t such that each sequence S over G of length |S| ≥ t has a nonempty zero-sum subsequence of length not equal to ℓ. In this paper, we determine $dis{c}_{\ell }\left(G\right)$ for certain finite groups, including cyclic groups, the groups $G=C₂\oplus C_{2m}$ and elementary abelian 2-groups. Following Girard, we define disc(G) as the smallest positive integer t such that every sequence S over G with |S| ≥ t has nonempty zero-sum subsequences...

We study sums and products in a field. Let $F$ be a field with $\mathrm{ch}\left(F\right)\ne 2$, where $\mathrm{ch}\left(F\right)$ is the characteristic of $F$. For any integer $k\ge 4$, we show that any $x\in F$ can be written as $a_1+\cdots +a_k$ with $a_1,\cdots ,a_k\in F$ and $a_1\cdots a_k=1$, and that for any $\alpha \in F\setminus \left\{0\right\}$ we can write every $x\in F$ as $a_1\cdots a_k$ with $a_1,\cdots ,a_k\in F$ and $a_1+\cdots +a_k=\alpha$. We also prove that for any $x\in F$ and $k\in \{2,3,\cdots \}$ there are $a_1,\cdots ,a_{2k}\in F$ such that $a_1+\cdots +a_{2k}=x=a_1\cdots a_{2k}$.

This paper generalizes some results from another one, namely [3]. We have studied the issues of expressing natural numbers as a sum of powers of natural numbers in paper [3]. It means we have studied sets of type $A=\{n_1^{k_1}+n_2^{k_2}+\cdots +n_m^{k_m}\mid n_i\in \mathbb{N}\cup \left\{0\right\},i=1,2\cdots ,m,(n_1,n_2,\cdots ,n_m)\ne (0,0,\cdots ,0)\},$ where $k_1,k_2,\cdots ,k_m\in \mathbb{N}$ were given natural numbers. Now we are going to study a more general case, i.e. sets of natural numbers that are expressed as sum of integral parts of functional values of some special functions. It means that we are interested in sets of natural numbers in the form $$k=\left[f_1\left(n_1\right)\right]+\left[f_2\left(n_2\right)\right]+\cdots +\left[f_m\left(n_m\right)\right].$$

Let G be a finite abelian group of rank r and let X be a zero-sum free sequence over G whose support supp(X) generates G. In 2009, Pixton proved that $\left|\Sigma \left(X\right)\right|\ge 2^{r-1}\left(\right|X|-r+2)-1$ for r ≤ 3. We show that this result also holds for abelian groups G of rank 4 if the smallest prime p dividing |G| satisfies p ≥ 13.

We offer a complete answer to the following question on the growth of sumsets in commutative groups. Let h be a positive integer and $A,B₁,...,B_h$ be finite sets in a commutative group. We bound $|A+B₁+...+B_h|$ from above in terms of |A|, |A + B₁|, ..., $|A+B_h|$ and h. Extremal examples, which demonstrate that the bound is asymptotically sharp in all parameters, are furthermore provided.