Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 December 2015
We will show that the sequence appearing in the double recurrence theorem is a good universal weight for the Furstenberg averages. That is, given a system $(X,{\mathcal{F}},\unicode[STIX]{x1D707},T)$ and bounded functions $f_{1},f_{2}\in L^{\infty }(\unicode[STIX]{x1D707})$, there exists a set of full-measure $X_{f_{1},f_{2}}$ in $X$ that is independent of integers $a$ and $b$ and a positive integer $k$ such that, for all $x\in X_{f_{1},f_{2}}$, for every other measure-preserving system $(Y,{\mathcal{G}},\unicode[STIX]{x1D708},S)$ and for each bounded and measurable function $g_{1},\ldots ,g_{k}\in L^{\infty }(\unicode[STIX]{x1D708})$, the averages