A correspondence principle between (hyper)graph theory and probability theory, and the (hyper)graph removal lemma

Terence Tao

Published 2006-02-02, updated 2007-06-04Version 2

We introduce a correspondence principle (analogous to the Furstenberg correspondence principle) that allows one to extract an infinite random graph or hypergraph from a sequence of increasingly large deterministic graphs or hypergraphs. As an application we present a new (infinitary) proof of the hypergraph removal lemma of Nagle-Schacht-R\"odl-Skokan and Gowers, which does not require the hypergraph regularity lemma and requires significantly less computation. This in turn gives new proofs of several corollaries of the hypergraph removal lemma, such as Szemer\'edi's theorem on arithmetic progressions.