English

On Erd\H{o}s covering systems in global function fields

Number Theory 2024-08-26 v2

Abstract

A covering system of the integers is a finite collection of arithmetic progressions whose union is the set of integers. A well-known problem on covering systems is the minimum modulus problem posed by Erd\H{o}s in 1950, who asked whether the minimum modulus in such systems with distinct moduli can be arbitrarily large. This problem was resolved by Hough in 2015, who showed that the minimum modulus is at most 101610^{16}. In 2022, Balister, Bollob\'as, Morris, Sahasrabudhe and Tiba reduced Hough's bound to 616,000616,000 by developing Hough's method. They call it the distortion method. In this paper, by applying this method, we mainly prove that there does not exist any covering system of multiplicity ss in any global function field of genus gg over Fq\mathbb{F}_q for q(1.14+0.16g)e6.5+0.97gs2q\geq (1.14+0.16g)e^{6.5+0.97g}s^2. In particular, there is no covering system of Fq[x]\mathbb{F}_q[x] with distinct moduli for q759q\geq 759.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2402.03810,
  title  = {On Erd\H{o}s covering systems in global function fields},
  author = {Huixi Li and Biao Wang and Chunlin Wang and Shaoyun Yi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.03810},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

10 pages, accepted by J. Number Theory

R2 v1 2026-06-28T14:39:50.579Z