Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2004 iii Paper 11 5 Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
For and nonempty , letThe Talagrand convex distance isEquivalently,For completeness, let be a closest point of the finite convex hull to zero. If , minimality gives for every . Taking proves that the supremum is at least . Conversely each permitted has by Cauchy-Schwarz. The weights are nonnegative because the hull has nonnegative coordinates. If , both sides are zero. This proves the dual definition used below.
We prove Talagrand's convex distance inequality by induction on the number of factors. Write , with measure , and . For a last-coordinate value , let . Choose a section of largest probability , and put . The total event probability is .
If has positive probability, combine mismatch vectors from and from . A weight on the second section contributes at most in the last coordinate. Convexity of the squared Euclidean norm gives, for every ,The last-coordinate contribution is actually zero if , so the displayed upper bound remains valid. Hölder's inequality and the induction hypothesis yieldFor a zero-probability section use directly, so no division by zero or exponent of an infinite quantity is needed.
The scalar estimate for Talagrand product induction isHere is its proof. For set . If , take ; the logarithm of the left expression is . Put . Then andsince for . Thus . If , choose . The already proved boundary case gives . The same direct choice covers .
Average the resulting section bounds over :where the last inequality is equivalent to . The induction starts on the zero-coordinate singleton, where every positive-probability event is the whole space and the moment is one. HenceWe assume ; a zero-probability event has no finite right-hand bound to prove. Markov's inequality also gives
For the subsequence application, let be the longest increasing subsequence length for independent sequence coordinates. A witness of length uses only positions. If and satisfies , at least witness positions must change: all unchanged witness positions remain in increasing order. Put weights on the witness and zero elsewhere. The dual distance definition giveswhere the latter expression increases with for . Therefore the increasing-subsequence certificate concentration bound isIf the lower event has probability zero the conclusion is immediate.
Let be an integer median, so . Taking the two thresholds in the bound gives, for ,For the lower event is empty. In a nonempty sequence . Integration of these tails gives an explicit mean-median estimate: use for and for , obtainingWriting , the median property also gives . Consequently, for a universal constant , all satisfyThus the subsequence length is concentrated near its mean on the scale , rather than the generic coordinate-exposure scale . This argument applies directly to finite-valued independent sequences. Independent continuous samples follow by refining finite coordinate discretizations; the strict-order pattern stabilizes almost surely when ties have probability zero. A uniform random permutation is the rank sequence of independent continuous samples, so it has the same subsequence-length concentration. Arbitrarily dependent random sequences are not covered by the product-space assumption.