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 , with ranging from 1 to , has an easy evaluation for all odd integers . 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.
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}
}