Extensions to the Method of Multiplicities, with Applications to Kakeya Sets and Mergers

We extend the “method of multiplicities” to get the following results, of interest in combinatorics and randomness extraction. (i) We show that every Kakeya set in $\mathbb{F}_q^n$, the $n$-dimensional vector space over the finite field on $q$ elements, must be of size at least $q^n/2^n$. This bound is tight to within a $2+o(1)$ factor for every $n$ as $q\to\infty$. (ii) We give improved “randomness mergers”: Mergers are seeded functions that take as input $\ell$ (possibly correlated) random variables in $\{0,1\}^N$ and a short random seed and output a single random variable in $\{0,1\}^N$ that is statistically close to having entropy $(1-\delta)\cdot N$ when one of the $\ell$ input variables is distributed uniformly. The seed we require is only $(1/\delta)\cdot\log\ell$-bits long, which significantly improves upon previous construction of mergers. (iii) We give improved randomness extractors, based on our improved mergers. Specifically, we show how to construct randomness extractors that use logarithmic ...