English

Denominators of Bernoulli polynomials

Number Theory 2018-04-25 v1

Abstract

For a positive integer nn let Pn=sp(n)pp,\mathfrak{P}_n=\prod_{s_p(n)\ge p} p, where pp runs over all primes and sp(n)s_p(n) is the sum of the base pp digits of nn. For all nn we prove that Pn\mathfrak{P}_n is divisible by all "small" primes with at most one exception. We also show that Pn\mathfrak{P}_n is large, has many prime factors exceeding n\sqrt{n}, with the largest one exceeding n20/37n^{20/37}. We establish Kellner's conjecture, which says that the number of prime factors exceeding n\sqrt{n} grows asymptotically as κn/logn\kappa \sqrt{n}/\log n for some constant κ\kappa with κ=2\kappa=2. Further, we compare the sizes of Pn\mathfrak{P}_n and Pn+1\mathfrak{P}_{n+1}, leading to the somewhat surprising conclusion that although Pn\mathfrak{P}_n tends to infinity with nn, the inequality Pn>Pn+1\mathfrak{P}_n>\mathfrak{P}_{n+1} is more frequent than its reverse.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1706.09804,
  title  = {Denominators of Bernoulli polynomials},
  author = {Olivier Bordellès and Florian Luca and Pieter Moree and Igor E. Shparlinski},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.09804},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

25 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-22T20:33:32.039Z