A Fixed-Prime Criterion for Reciprocals in Missing-Digit Sets
Abstract
We prove a structural upper bound on the -adic valuation of denominators of rationals belonging to a missing-digit set , generalizing a key step in recent work of Lin, Wu, and Yang [arXiv:2603.24614] on reciprocals of factorials. For a rational with and a fixed prime , membership in forces to be controlled by the -adic valuation of the multiplicative order of modulo the radical of , with explicit overhead depending only on and . Because the obstruction is stated at the level of a single denominator, a pair of sequence-specific valuation estimates converts it into an effective finiteness criterion for . Specializing to the case in which is the part of coprime to recovers the fixed-prime step in the Lin--Wu--Yang argument. As applications, we treat reciprocals of superfactorials, products of polynomial values, and products of Fibonacci numbers. We also exhibit an exponential family -- products of -- for which the full structural criterion applies but a coarser largest-prime-factor formulation does not.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2604.11282,
title = {A Fixed-Prime Criterion for Reciprocals in Missing-Digit Sets},
author = {Scott Duke Kominers},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.11282},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
24 pages, 5 tables, plus source code appendix