The number of Sidon sets and the maximum size of Sidon sets contained in a sparse random set of integers

A set A of non‐negative integers is called a Sidon set if all the sums , with and a₁, , are distinct. A well‐known problem on Sidon sets is the determination of the maximum possible size F(n) of a Sidon subset of . Results of Chowla, Erd?s, Singer and Turán from the 1940s give that . We study Sidon subsets of sparse random sets of integers, replacing the ‘dense environment’ by a sparse, random subset R of , and ask how large a subset can be, if we require that S should be a Sidon set. Let be a random subset of of cardinality , with all the subsets of equiprobable. We investigate the random variable , where the maximum is taken over all Sidon subsets , and obtain quite precise information on for the whole range of m, as illustrated by the following abridged version of our results. Let be a fixed constant and suppose . We show that there is a constant such that, almost surely, we have . As it turns out, the function is a continuous, piecewise linear function of a that is non‐differentiable at two ‘critical’ points: a = 1/3 and a = 2/3. Somewhat surprisingly, between those two points, the function is constant. Our approach is based on estimating the number of Sidon sets of a given cardinality contained in n]. Our estimates also directly address a problem raised by Cameron and Erd?s (On the number of sets of integers with various properties, Number theory (Banff, AB, 1988), de Gruyter, Berlin, 1990, pp. 61–79). © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Random Struct. Alg., 46, 1–25, 2015