English

An alternating sum of the floor function of square roots

Number Theory 2025-10-31 v1

Abstract

We show that the alternating sum of the floor function of jn\sqrt{jn}, with jj ranging from 1 to nn, has an easy evaluation for all odd integers n1n\geq 1. This is in contrast to known non-alternating sums of the same type which hold only for a class of primes. The proof is elementary and was suggested by an AI model. To put this result in perspective, we also prove an asymptotic expression for the analogous sum without the floor function.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.26291,
  title  = {An alternating sum of the floor function of square roots},
  author = {Marc Chamberland and Karl Dilcher},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.26291},
  year   = {2025}
}